A natural resource curse: the unintended effects of gold mining on malaria

Pagel, Jeffrey ORCID: 0000-0003-4130-7060 (2025) A natural resource curse: the unintended effects of gold mining on malaria. Ecological Economics, 230. ISSN 0921-8009

Text (gold_mining_and_malaria_-_final_manuscript) - Accepted Version Repository staff only until 24 December 2026. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (3MB)

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Abstract

This paper studies whether extractive-resource-activities provoke an ecological response on the emergence and proliferation of malaria by altering the reproductive environment of mosquitoes. In January 2004, the government of the Philippines launched the Minerals Action Plan (MAP), which significantly improved the investment climate in the country's mining sector. I exploit the timing of the reform and the spatial distribution of mineral endowments through a difference-in-differences (DID) approach that compares provinces with and without gold deposits before and after the reform. After the MAP reform, provinces with deposits of gold had 32 percent more malaria cases per 100,000 relative to provinces without gold deposits. I perform several falsification tests as well as investigate other potential mechanisms which further suggest that the main mechanism is through gold mining's creation of slow-moving bodies of stagnant water, which provide an ideal breeding site for Anopheles mosquitoes, malaria's main transmission vector, to propagate and reproduce.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 Elsevier B.V.
Divisions:	Geography & Environment Grantham Research Institute
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Date Deposited:	07 Jan 2025 15:15
Last Modified:	21 Jan 2025 10:48
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126624

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