Natural Disasters, Self-Insurance and Human Capital Investment : Evidence from Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Malawi
This paper examines the impacts of disasters on dynamic human capital production using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The empirical results show that the accumulation of biological human capital prior to disasters helps children...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20090424143700 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4104 |
| Summary: | This paper examines the impacts of
disasters on dynamic human capital production using panel
data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The empirical
results show that the accumulation of biological human
capital prior to disasters helps children maintain
investments in the post-disaster period. Biological human
capital formed in early childhood (long-term nutritional
status) plays a role of insurance with resilience to
disasters by protecting schooling investment and outcomes,
although disasters have negative impacts on investment. In
Bangladesh, children with more biological human capital are
less affected by the adverse effects of floods, and the rate
of investment increases with the initial human capital stock
in the post-disaster recovery process. In Ethiopia and
Malawi, where droughts are rather frequent, exposure to
highly frequent droughts in some cases reduces schooling
investment but the negative impacts are larger among
children embodying less biological human capital. Asset
holdings prior to the disasters, especially the
household's stock of intellectual human capital, also
helps maintain schooling investments at least to the same
degree as the stock of human capital accumulated in children
prior to the disasters. |
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