Malaria and Natural Disasters: Evidence Using GMM Approach

Abstract

Natural disasters not only disrupt accessibility to education, health care, food supplies and clean water, but causes outbreak of diseases. These issues deteriorate the health conditions among the victims of disasters and reduce human capital accumulation that adversely affects the economic development of the country. This paper examines the impact of total disasters and floods on malaria incidences using panel data over the period 2008 to 2014 for 79 countries. For robustness check, we use two measures on each of these natural disasters; the number of occurrences and number of people affected by these disasters. Employing the system Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) model, the findings show that the occurrences and the number of people affected by total disasters and flood, significantly increases cases of malaria. Income and education negatively impact the incidences of malaria whereas urbanization and deforestation increase the rates of malaria cases.