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

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.