Excerpt
Excerpt
The Twenty Year Economic Impacts of Deworming in Kenya. Michael Kremer, January 8, 2020, Paper, "Estimating the impact of child health investments on adult living standards faces several major methodological challenges, including the paucity of experimental interventions for which it is feasible to locate participants many years later, as well as difficulties in accurately measuring economic outcomes. This study exploits a randomized school health intervention that provided deworming treatment to Kenyan children. We estimate impacts on their living standards and wellbeing 20 years later, at which point the effective respondent tracking rate was 85%. We show that deworming beneficiaries experience a 10% gain in consumption expenditure, and a 7% gain in total adult earnings. Effect sizes are similar (14% and 4%) when pooling across multiple survey rounds 10 to 20 years after the deworming treatment. This measure improves on previous work in its comprehensiveness and methodology. Treatment group individuals are also more likely to live in urban areas. Given deworming’s extremely low cost, a conservative estimate of deworming’s annualized social internal rate of return is 42.1%." Link