Rainfall Shocks and the Effects on Child Anthropometric Measures in Rural Ethiopia: Empirical Evidence of Gender Differences

Sammanfattning: This paper seeks to estimate the effects of rainfall fluctuations on the anthropometric health of children under the age of five in rural Ethiopia. Our interest is to study whether boys and girls experience differential treatment in the intra-household allocation of resources towards health following rainfall shocks in the previous rainy season and whether or not children of different ages are especially sensitive. We investigate how these deviations in rainfall affect children's anthropometric measures, as measured by z-scores for weight-for-height, weight-for-age, and height-for-age. Using survey data from the Demographic Health Survey and rainfall data from NASA, this paper seeks to add to the inconclusive literature on investment in children's health by gender in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ethiopia provides a particularly suitable setting for linking rainfall to income due to its high level of agricultural dependence and households' low capabilities for consumption smoothing. We find that children under the age of five benefit in weight-for-age and height-for-age following a positive rainfall shock, but that female children fare worse in terms of weight-for-age compared to their male counterparts. When looking at age cohorts, newborns are found to be especially sensitive to both wet and dry shocks. While newborn boys benefit in terms of weight-for-age and height-for-age following a positive shock, newborn girls have significantly worse outcomes for the same measures in comparison. Newborns are found to benefit in general from negative rainfall shocks.