Abstract/Summary

Famines claimed more than 70 million lives in the 20th century (Devereux, 2000). While many efforts were made in the past several decades to prevent future famines and other forms of food shortages, global trends, such as pandemics, more frequent extreme weather patterns, and armed conflicts suggest that famines are not a matter of the past but will remain a looming risk in the future. Short-term and long-term effects of famines have been extensively studied. One of those short-term effects is the excess mortality rate caused by famine, and it includes those who died due to starvation and those who were not born due to famine and who would have been born in the absence of famine. Long-term effects of a famine covered by the literature include economic and health effects. Among the economic effects are lost productivity due to lost schooling and reduced cognitive abilities, while the health literature documents long-term impacts on noncommunicable diseases, body mass index (BMI), height, and other indicators of well-being. Using the Great Famine of China (1959–1961) as a quasi-natural experiment, this dissertation examines the effects of early-life famine on nutrient intake later in life. The Great Famine provides a useful natural laboratory to analyse these effects in that it was very long, with unprecedented severity and substantial variation across the regions of China. Regional variation in famine severity, combined with variations in health consequences across different birth-year cohorts, gender and nationality, provides a suitable setting for identifying the effects of famine on food choice and consumption later in life. In this dissertation I show that memories of famine have an enduring effect on eating patterns and lifestyle habits. I find evidence that individuals who were more affected by early-life famine have significantly different eating patterns, measured by qualitative and quantitative characteristics. I show that the Great Famine severely affected the dietary diversity and macro-nutrient composition of diets of survivors, in particular, those who were in early childhood during the famine. I also find significant differences across gender, nationality, educational attainment and income, which suggests that some of these factors moderate the harms of famine. Furthermore, I find that exposure to the Great Famine negatively affected food expenditures of famine survivors. Taken together, this study’s evidence indicates that the Great Famine had a considerable sustained impact on nutrient intake of the survivors more than 40 years later.