The health consequences of Mozambican civil war: an anthropometric approach

Survivors are the ones who bear the burden of reconstruction, thus the examination of the costs of civil conflicts to survivors health is crucial for the design of post-war economic policies. This paper investigates this question for the Mozambican civil war, using an original geo-referenced event dataset. I find that women exposed to the conflict during the early years of life have a weaker health, reflected by a lower height for age z-score (HAZ). Using the Infancy Childhood Puberty curves, a concept given by the medical literature studying the human growth process, I point out that this negative effect depends both on the age of entry into civil war and on the number of months spent in conflict. Furthermore, this study indicates that months of civil war before a woman's birth also have a negative impact on her health highlighting the importance of the prenatal conditions