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Industrialization, pollution, and infant mortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2010

MAYA FEDERMAN  and
DAVID I. LEVINE
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Abstract

This study examines the effects of growing manufacturing employment on infant mortality across almost 200 Indonesian districts from 1985 to 1995, a time of rapid industrialization. Overall, we find no relationship between growing manufacturing employment in general and infant mortality. However, when the growth in manufacturing is concentrated in more polluting industries (as measured by the construction of a harm-weighted index of predicted emissions from manufacturing), there were economically and statistically significant increases in infant mortality. Finally, we consider a variety of potential causal channels that may change with industrialization (such as housing quality and access to health care) and whose change may help to explain the observed relationships. Although most of the various factors are correlated with infant mortality and the industrialization measures are correlated with changes in several factors, conditioning on these measures does not change our basic results.

Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 5 , October 2010 , pp. 557 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

We appreciate comments from the BACPOP seminar, Bo Cutter, Daniel Levine, and Lingyun Nie. Kok-Hoe Chan provided both insights and some data and Benn Eifert designed some of the estimators.

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