Project Draft Paper
Children of War: Inter-group Conflict and Child Welfare in Iraq
Date
October, 2020
Conflicts lead to not only deaths, but the consequences could be a source of stress on household decisions related to capital accumulation and child labor and lead to food shortages and health crises. It is crucial to understand how conflict impacts children and young adults to determine the social costs that armed conflicts entail, particularly for those exposed during childhood, since such exposure can have lasting effects on health and education outcomes that are difficult to reverse. The paper addresses the effects of armed conflict on children’s health in Iraq over the period of 2000-2018. In this current version, we provide simple OLS estimations by measuring cumulative conflict exposure across the child’s life and how it affects different health and education outcomes using data extracted from the 2018 MICS and GDELT version 2.0 data. The findings reveal a clear significant and negative correlation between aggregate conflict exposure over the child’s lifetime and young children’s weight-for-age, height-for-age, weight-for-height, and likelihood of recently having a cough. For older children, we find evidence that conflict exposure is associated with a reduction in the likelihood of attending school in the recent academic year, but we find no significant relationship between conflict exposure, mental health, and child labor.
Research Associates
Reham Rizk
Director of the Egypt Impact Lab, J-PAL...
Authors
Colette Salemi
Research Assistant at the University of Minnesota