Three Essays in Development Economics

Abstract

This thesis contains three self-contained papers on issues of policy relevance for developing countries in the areas of health and political economy. In the first paper, by using the exogenous measure of physical intensity of natural disasters, I study the impacts of natural disasters on child mortality. Cross-country data on a global scale is employed to examine the impacts of both geophysical and meteorological disasters on under-5 mortality rates, using the difference-in-differences, and dynamic panel method. Overall, disasters have no discernible effects on mortality. Once the income levels of countries are considered, disasters are found to affect the children only in low-income countries, and the effects are persistent. The results are indicative of a lower GDP and vaccination rates amongst children, along with increased maternal mortality and disease incidences in low-income countries as a plausible explanation. In the second paper, by using rainfall as a proxy for agricultural income, I study the effects of income shocks on under-5 mortality at a sub-national level, using the difference-in- differences method. Rainfall is found to have a positive relationship with agricultural output in developing countries, thereby justifying the use of rainfall as a proxy for agricultural income. Results reveal that rainfall shocks lead to small, but statistically significant increases in mortality overall. However, the low-income group of countries that are primarily reliant on agriculture are affected the most due to rainfall fluctuations. Districts that lie downstream to dams that may have access to reservoir water are insulated from the vagaries of rainfall. Results remain robust to the consideration of various relevant issues such as selective fertility, selective migration, and measles immunization rates, along with various other robustness tests. Concerns addressed in the first and second essays may be worse in developing countries, generally, due to rampant inequality and the role that institutions play in exacerbating it. In the third paper, I study the rent-seeking behaviour exhibited by politicians in a developing world context. By using the constituency data from Indian state elections, the thesis shows that powerful politicians engage in distributive politics in their elected constituencies. In this study, the focus is on the leaders of state governments i.e. chief ministers in India. Using nightlights as a proxy for local economic activity, we identify that during the tenure of chief ministers, their elected constituencies see a statistically and economically significant increase in nightlight activity. Results are driven by non-birth regions of chief ministers, confirming that the effect in play is political expediency, rather than ethnic favoritism.