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Thursday, February 2nd, 2023

Mélanie Gittard (PSAE) will present “MiningLeaks: Water Pollution and Child Mortality in Africa”, with Irène Hu (PSE - Paris 1).

Industrial mining can be a boon or a bane for communities living in the vicinity of production sites. We assess the effects of mining-induced pollution on health outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa using the DHS micro-data from 1986-2018 in 26 countries matched with geocoded data of industrial mining sites. Through a staggered difference-in-difference strategy, we exploit the variation of the opening of a mine and the relative topographic position of surrounding villages, comparing upstream and downstream villages. Being downstream of an open mine increases by 2.18 percentage points the 24-month mortality rate, corresponding to a 25% increase. This effect is mainly driven by the consumption of plain water, corroborating the mechanism of water pollution. The effect on mortality is not driven by a change in women’s fertility, nor by a change in the access to piped water or other facilities, nor by in-migration. The effect is concentrated while the mine is active and when international mineral prices are high, is larger in areas with high mining density and fades out with distance. It is robust to the estimator of Chaisemartin and D’Haultfoeuille, 2020, to a restriction to a balanced sample, to accounting for measurement errors, and to spatial and temporal randomization inference tests.