Abstract
This article uses the Bangladesh famine of 1974 as a natural experiment to estimate the impact of intrauterine malnutrition on sex of the child and infant mortality. In addition, we estimate the impact of malnutrition on post-famine pregnancy outcomes. Using the 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), we find that women who were pregnant during the famine were less likely to have male children. Moreover, children who were in utero during the most severe period of the Bangladesh famine were 32 % more likely to die within one month of birth compared with their siblings who were not in utero during the famine. Finally, we estimate the impacts of the famine on subsequent pregnancy outcomes. Controlling for pre-famine fertility, we find that women who were pregnant during the famine experienced a higher number of stillbirths in the post-famine years. This increase appears to be driven by an excess number of male stillbirths.
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There are several other smaller differences between our studies. Razzaque et al. (1990) defined the period of the famine-born as July 1974 through June 1975 and compared the outcomes during that period with those during a famine-conceived period of July 1975–1976 and a non-famine period between July 1976 and March 1977. Our study uses a different definition of the famine—August 1974 to October 1975—based on the months when the price of rice was more than 50 % higher than the pre-famine price. Our study also uses a wider window of time as a control group and has other minor differences, such as our use of a multivariate logistic regression instead of a univariate one.
When the specific month of birth was not remembered or unavailable, fieldworkers often coded the birth as occurring in January. Thus, the data include an inaccurately large number of January births. The main specifications in this article are estimated with these January births included. However, all results (available upon request) are qualitatively robust to the exclusion of January births from the sample. In addition, the years 1970–1972 were also associated with bad crops, high food prices, and political turmoil. We estimated similar regressions in which we limited the sample to the years 1974–1980, effectively eliminating the war, earlier famine, and hardship from the control group; we found similar qualitative and quantitative results, which are available upon request.
Birth weight and access to prenatal care are potential channels through which in utero exposure to the famine may affect infant mortality. The results presented are similar in magnitude and significance when these variables are excluded.
We include a dummy variable for the villages where the Maternal and Child Health Family Planning would be present even though that project did not begin until 1978 to account for potential differences between these villages even before the project began. We also estimate regressions without including these dummy variables and find nearly identical results, which are available upon request. Season-of-birth dummy variables include whether the child was born during the monsoon season (June–October) or the dry winter season (November–February), with the omitted category being the pre-monsoon hot season (March–May). Infant deaths are significantly higher during the winter season, largely because of agricultural cycles.
This type of selection implies that women who choose to become pregnant during a famine are negatively selected. Based on observable measures, the descriptive statistics from Table 2 suggest the opposite: although the magnitude of the difference is not large, women who became pregnant during the famine were more educated and married spouses who were more educated, compared with women who avoided pregnancy.
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We are grateful to Daniel Rees, Angela Dills, and Martha Bailey for useful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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Hernández-Julián, R., Mansour, H. & Peters, C. The Effects of Intrauterine Malnutrition on Birth and Fertility Outcomes: Evidence From the 1974 Bangladesh Famine. Demography 51, 1775–1796 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0326-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0326-5