Civil War and Economic Sanctions: Analysis of Anthropometric Outcomes in Burundi

This paper investigates the impact of the latest civil war and the subsequent economic embargo in Burundi on the health status of the Burundese children. We find that the civil war and the economic embargo had a particularly detrimental impact on the nutritional status of rural populations, due to a direct effect of the civil war and to the soaring of food prices during the embargo. A rural Burundese child who was affected by both shocks had a height-for-age of 1 standard deviation lower compared to a similar child who did not suffer from these 2 events. These shocks seem not to have affected the health status of urban children. In the analyses, we control for a variety of household and community characteristics using data from the 1998 household Priority Survey.