Exposure to Conflict and Childhood Mortality: An Analyses of Pooled Cross-Sectional Data for 943,139 Children across 52 Countries and 105 Surveys

Shalem Balla, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi

This study analyses the adverse impact of different types of conflicts on child mortality and its mechanisms across a large group of countries. Our analysis pools data from multiple countries and time-points, to provide robust evidence on the relationship between conflict and child health. Geo-referenced data on various forms of conflict are combined with the Demographic Health Survey datasets, to construct a large unique database of 943139 pre-school age children across 52 developing countries over the period 1993-2018. Our analysis exploits the within-country differences in children’s exposure to conflict from in utero to age 5, to estimate its association with mortality outcomes. Our bivariate estimate shows the association between conflict exposure and childhood mortality where we found excess mortality in children exposed to conflict. The multivariate regression estimates show that even after controlling for an extensive array of socio-economic and demographic characteristics and location-fixed effects, conflict exposure is associated with excess child mortality, across all our measures of conflict. Proximate mechanisms explaining excess mortality in children exposed to conflict include poor maternal health outcomes (ANC and Institutional delivery care), child health outcomes (height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores), and immunization status. These findings are robust across alternative measures of conflict, and sub-samples.

Keywords: Health and Morbidity, Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Mortality and Longevity

See paper.