Child mortality, commodity price volatility and the resource curse
Yousef Makhlouf1, Neil M Kellard2, Dmitri Vinogradov2
1College of Business Law and Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom.
Social Science & Medicine (1982)
|February 20, 2017
Summary
Commodity price volatility negatively impacts child mortality in developing nations. However, strong institutions can reduce this effect, highlighting a tripartite relationship for improved child wellbeing.
Area of Science:
- Development Economics
- Global Health
- Economic Policy
Background:
- Developing economies often rely heavily on primary commodities.
- Commodity price fluctuations can significantly impact child wellbeing.
- Understanding the link between economic factors and child mortality is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between child mortality and commodity price movements.
- To examine the role of commodity terms-of-trade volatility on child mortality.
- To assess the influence of institutional quality on this relationship.
Main Methods:
- Panel data analysis of 69 low and lower-middle income countries.
- Data spanning from 1970 to 2010.
- Focus on country-specific commodity terms-of-trade volatility.
Main Results:
- Increased commodity terms-of-trade volatility is associated with higher child mortality in highly commodity-dependent importers.
- This suggests a 'scarce' resource curse effect.
- Good institutions were found to mitigate the negative impact of volatility on child mortality.
Conclusions:
- A tripartite relationship exists between child mortality, commodity price volatility, and institutional quality.
- Improving child wellbeing in low to lower-middle income countries requires a multi-faceted approach.
- Effective strategies include hedging, import diversification, and enhancing institutional quality.
Related Concept Videos
00:57Population Growth
29.3K
Population size is dynamic, increasing with birth rates and immigration, and decreasing with death rates and emigration. In ideal conditions with unlimited resources, populations can increase exponentially, which plots as a J-shaped growth rate curve of population size against time. This type of curve is characteristic of newly-introduced invasive species, or populations that have suffered catastrophic declines and are rebounding.
29.3K
02:07Conservation of Declining Populations
13.5K
Conservation of declining population focuses on ways of detecting, diagnosing, and halting a population decline. The approach uses methods to prevent populations from going extinct.
13.5K
00:51Energy Budgets
11.0K
Organisms must balance energy intake with the energy required for growth, maintenance and reproduction. These trade-offs result in a variety of survivorship and reproductive strategies, including semelparity and iteroparity. Semelparous species, like annual plants, have only one reproductive episode in their lifetimes and consequently have short lifespans. Iteroparous species, by contrast, have many reproductive events during their lifetimes but have relatively few offspring. These two...
11.0K
01:26Estimating Population Standard Deviation
3.4K
When the population standard deviation is unknown and the sample size is large, the sample standard deviation s is commonly used as a point estimate of σ. However, it can sometimes under or overestimate the population standard deviation. To overcome this drawback, confidence intervals are determined to estimate population parameters and eliminate any calculation bias accurately. However, this only applies to random samples from normally distributed populations. Knowing the sample mean and...
3.4K
01:29Life Histories
23.1K
Overview
23.1K
01:12Relative Risk
2.3K
Relative risk (RR) is a statistical measure commonly used in epidemiology to compare the likelihood of a particular event occurring between two groups. This metric is important for evaluating the relationship between exposure to a specific risk factor and the probability of a particular outcome. It plays a crucial role in medical research, public health studies, and risk assessment. Relative risk quantifies how much more (or less) likely an event is to occur in an exposed group compared to an...
2.3K