Fighting Against Malaria: Prevent Wars While Waiting for the Miraculous Vaccine

Abstract

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and also observed that during the 80's and part of the 90's its incidence increased noticably. There are basically two factors behind the incidence of malaria: 'geographical destiny' and socio-economic conditions. In this paper we explore the influence of civil wars and war refugees on the incidence of malaria in the refugee-receiving countries, using a large panel data. The panel structure helps to separate 'geographical destiny' from social conditions. The results of the estimation show that for each 1,000 refugees there are between 2,000 and 2,700 cases of malaria in the refugee receiving country. The average economic impact of those refugees taken in a sample of African countries reaches 3.6% of the income of 1995.

Keywords: Civil wars, forced migration, economic impact

JEL Classification: I18, I31, O15