Hostname: page-component-669899f699-tzmfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-26T03:51:37.877Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

LONG-TERM EXPOSURE TO MALARIA AND DEVELOPMENT: DISAGGREGATE EVIDENCE FOR CONTEMPORANEOUS AFRICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2017

Matteo Cervellati ,
Elena Esposito  and
Uwe Sunde
Matteo Cervellati*
Affiliation:
University of Bologna, IZA and CESIfo
Elena Esposito
Affiliation:
DEEP – HEC Lausanne
Uwe Sunde
Affiliation:
LMU, IZA, CESIfo and CEPR
*
Address correspondence to: Matteo Cervellati, Department of Economics, University of Bologna. Piazza Scaravilli, 2 40136 BolognaItaly; e-mail: m.cervellati@unibo.it
Get access

Abstract:

Malaria afflicts mankind since thousands of years and still imposes serious health impediments and considerable mortality on the affected populations. Empirical investigations of the role of malaria for economic development at the country level deliver mixed findings, however. We study the role of long-term malaria exposure on development today using disaggregate within-country variation for the whole of Africa with 1 × 1 degree cells as units of observation. Local development is measured by light density at night. Based on insights from epidemiology, which documents that genetic and acquired immunities reduce Malaria risk for adults in holoendemic areas, the effect is hypothesized to be nonlinear, with a peak for intermediate rather than high exposure to the pathogen. The empirical findings support this hypothesis. The results also suggest the existence of a significant moderating effect of genetic immunities measured by the prevalence of the sickle cell trait in the population.

Keywords

Long-term exposure to malariaacquired immunitiesgenetic immunitiesnight lights per capitadisaggregated data AfricaJ1I15and C13
Type
Essays
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 83 , Issue 1: Short Essays on African Demography and Economic Development , March 2017 , pp. 129 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

Prepared for the Special Section of African Demography and Economic Development of the Journal of Demographic Economics.

References

Acemoglu, Daron and Johnson, Simon (2007) Disease and development: The effect of life expectancy on economic growth. Journal of Political Economy 115 (6), 925–985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Addison, Douglas and Stewart, Benjamin (2015) Nighttime Lights Revisited: The Use of Nighttime Lights Data as a Proxy for Economic Variables. Policy Research working paper 7496, World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alesina, Alberto, Michalopoulos, Stelios and Papaioannou, Elias (2016) Ethnic inequality. Journal of Political Economy, 124 (2), 428–488 (forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alsan, Marcella (2015) The effect of the TseTse fly on African development. American Economic Review 105 (1), 382–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashraf, Quamrul H., Lester, Aahley and Weil, David N. (2008) When Does Improving Health Raise GDP?. Mimeo, Brown University.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhatt, Samir, Weiss, S., Cameron, E., Bisanzio, D., Mappin, B., Dalrymple, U., Battle, K. E., Moyes, C. L., Henry, A., Eckhoff, P. A., Wenger, E. A., Briet, O., Penny, M. A., Smith, T. A., Bennett, A., Yukich, J., Eisele, T. P., Griffin, J. T., Fergus, C. A., Lynch, M., Lindgren, F., Cohen, J. M., Murray, C. L. J., Smith, D. L., Hay, S. I., Cibulskis, R. E. and Gething, P. W. (2015) The effect of malaria control on Plasmodium falciparum in Africa between 2000 and 2015. Nature, 526, 207–211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bickenbach, Frank, Bode, Eckhardt, Nunnenkamp, Peter, and Söder, Mareike (2016) Night lights and regional GDP. Review of World Economics 152 (2), 425–447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cervellati, Matteo, Chiovelli, Giorgio and Esposito, Elena (2016) Bite and Divide: Ancestral Exposure to Malaria and the Emergence and Persistence of Ethnic Diversity. Mimeo, University of Bologna.Google Scholar
Cervellati, Matteo, Esposito, Elena, Sunde, Uwe and Valmori, Simona (2016) Malaria Risk and Civil Violence. CEPR discussion paper 11496.Google Scholar
Cervellati, Matteo and Sunde, Uwe (2011) Life expectancy and economic growth: The role of the demographic transition. Journal of Economic Growth 16, 99–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cervellati, Matteo and Sunde, Uwe (2013) Life expectancy, schooling and lifetime labor supply: Theory and evidence revisited. Econometrica 81 (5), 2055–2086.Google Scholar
Cervellati, Matteo and Sunde, Uwe (2015) The economic and demographic transition, mortality and comparative development. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 7 (3), 189–225.Google Scholar
Cervellati, Matteo, Sunde, Uwe and Valmori, Simona (2016) Pathogens, weather shocks and civil conflicts. Economic Journal (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Chen, X. and Nordhaus, W. D. (2011) Using luminosity data as a proxy for economic statistics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (21), 8589–8594.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Depetris-Chauvin, Emilio and Weil, David N. (2016) Malaria and early African development: Evidence from the sickle Cell trait. Economic Journal (forthcoming).Google ScholarPubMed
Deressa, Wakgari, Hailemariam, Damen and Ali, Ahmed (2007) Economic costs of epidemic malaria to households in rural Ethiopia. Tropical Medicine and International Health 12 (10), 1148–1156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Doss, Cheryl, McPeak, John and Barrett, Christopher B. (2008) Interpersonal, intertemporal and spatial variation in risk perceptions: Evidence from East Africa. World Development 36 (8), 1453–1468.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, Ana, Marguti, Ivo, Bechmann, Ingo, Jeney, Viktoria, Chora, Angelo, Palha, Nuno R., Rebelo, Sofia, Henri, Annie, Beuzard, Yves, and Soares, Miguel P. (2011) Sickle hemoglobin confers tolerance to Plasmodium infection. Cell 145 (3), 398–409.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallup, John Luke and Sachs, Jeffrey D. (2001) The economic burden of malaria. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 64 (1), 85–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallup, John Luke, Sachs, Jeffrey D. and Mellinger, Andrew D. (1999) Geography and economic development. International Regional Science Review 22 (2), 179–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmore, Elisabeth, Gleditsch, Nils P., Lujala, Pivi, and Rod, Jan Ketil (2005) Conflict diamonds: A new dataset. Conflict Management and Peace Science 22 (3), 257–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Simon I, Guerra, Carlos A., Noor, Abdisalan M., Tatem, Andy J., and Snow, Robert W. (2004) The global distribution and population at risk of malaria: Past, present and future. Lancet Infectious Diseases 4 (6), 327–336.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henderson, J. Vernon, Storeygard, Adam and Weil, David N. (2012) Measuring economic growth from outer space. American Economic Review 102 (2), 994–1028.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kiszewski, Anthony, Mellinger, Andrew, Spielman, Andrew, Malaney, Pia, Sachs, Sonia Ehrlich, and Sachs, Jeffrey (2004) A global index representing the stability of malaria transmission. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 70 (5), 486–498.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kwiatkowski, Dominic P. (2005) How malaria has affected the human genome and what human genetics can teach us about malaria. The American Journal of Human Genetics 77 (2), 171–192.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Langhorne, Jean, Ndungu, Francis M., Sponaas, Annie-Marit, and Marsh, Kevin (2008) Immunity to malaria: More questions than answers. Nature Immunology 9 (7), 725–732.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lujala, Pivi, Rod, Jan Ketil and Thieme, Nadia (2007) Fighting over oil: Introducing a new dataset. Conflict Management and Peace Science 24 (3), 239–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lysenko, Alexei and Semashko, Nikholai I. (1968) Geography of malaria. A medico-geographic profile of an ancient disease. Itogi Nauki: Medicinskaja Geografija, 25–146.Google Scholar
McPeak, John, Little, Peter D. and Doss, Cheryl (2012) Risk and Social Change in an African Rural Economy: Lifelihood in Pastoralist Communities. London and New York: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
Michalopoulos, Stelios and Papaioannou, Elias (2013a) National institutions and subnational development in Africa. Quarterly Journal of Economics 129 (1), 151–213.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Michalopoulos, Stelios and Papaioannou, Elias (2013b) Pre-colonial ethnic institutions and contemporary African development. Econometrica 81 (1), 113–152.Google ScholarPubMed
New, Mark, Lister, David, Hulme, Mike, and Makin, Ian (2002) A high-resolution data set of surface climate over global land areas. Climate Research 21 (1), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onwujekwe, Obinna, Chima, Reginald and Okonkwo, Paul (2000) Economic burden of malaria illness on households versus that of all other illness episodes: A study in five malaria holo-endemic Nigerian communities. Health Policy 54, 143–159.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Piel, Frederic, Patil, Anand P., Howes, Rosalind E., Nyangiri, Oscar A., Gething, Peter W., Dewi, Mewhayu, Temperley, William H., Williams, Temperley N., Weatherall, David J., and Hay, Simon I. (2013) Global epidemiology of sickle haemoglobin in newborns: A contemporary geostatistical model-based map. The Lancet 381, 142–151.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinkovskiy, Maxim (2013) Economic Discontinuities at Borders: Evidence from Satellite Data on Lights at Night. Mimeo, MIT.Google Scholar
Pinkovskiy, Maxim and Martin, Xavier Sala-i (2016) Lights, camera, income! Illuminating the national accounts household surveys debate. Quarterly Journal of Economics 131 (2), 579–631.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramankutty, Navin, Foley, Jonathan A., Norman, John, and McSweeney, Kevin (2002) The global distribution of cultivable lands: Current patterns and sensitivity to possible climate change. Global Ecology and Biogeography 11 (5), 377–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riley, Shawn J., DeGloria, Stephen D. and Elliot, Robert (1999) A terrain ruggedness index that quantifies topographic heterogeneity. Intermountain Journal of Sciences 5 (1–4), 23–27.Google Scholar
Sachs, Jeffrey D. (2003) Institutions Don't Rule: Direct Effects of Geography on Per Capita Income. NBER working paper 9490.Google Scholar
Sicuri, Elisa, Vieta, Ana, Lindner, Leandro, Constenla, Dagna, and Sauboin, Christophe (2013) The economic costs of malaria in children in three sub-Saharan countries: Ghana, Tanzania and Kenya. Malaria Journal 12 (307), 1–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stanisic, Danielle, Fowkes, F., Koinari, M., Javati, S., Lin, E., Kiniboro, B., Richards, J., Robinson, L., Schofield, L., Kazura, J., Siba, K. C. L., Z. P., F. I., P., Mueller, I., and Beeson, J. (2015) Acquisition of antibodies against Plasmodium falciparum merozoites and malaria immunity in young children and the influence of age, force of infection and magnitude of response. Infection and Immunity 83 (2), 646–660.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weidmann, Nils B., Rd, Jan Ketil and Cederman, Lars-Erik (2010) Representing ethnic groups in space: A new dataset. Journal of Peace Research 4 (47), 491–499.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weil, David (2010) Endemic diseases and African economic growth: Challenges and policy responses. Journal of African Economies 19 (3), 81–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weil, David (2011) Malaria and Early Economic Development in Africa. Mimeo, Brown University.Google Scholar
Weil, David (2016) The Impact of Malaria on African Development over the Longue Duree. In Africa's Development in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Weil, David (2017) Gyrations in African mortality and their effect on economic growth. Journal of Demographic Economics 83 (1), 103–110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Whitfield, J. (2002) Portrait of a serial killer. Nature.Google Scholar