have on average undergone 0.15 more years of schooling and have 5.2% higher household incomes – even 26 to 47 years after birth. This suggests that early-life rainfall has a significant positive impact on the long-term welfare outcomes of women, while no similar correlation is found for men – possibly due to preferential treatment when resources are scarce. Maccini and Yang (2009) suggest that higher rainfall is associated with higher agricultural production, thus improving household income, nutrition and health. These are beneficial for girls’ human development, eventually leading to a higher socioeconomic standing even in the very long term.

Indeed, various studies confirm the existence of poverty traps as a result of disasters. Similarly, Carter et al. (2006) analyze data for the 1998/2000 drought in Ethiopia and the 1998 Hurricane Mitch in Honduras to investigate the role of households’ income levels in the recovery process. They document differences in the speed of recovery across income groups, while the poorest households in both countries were particularly likely to experience poverty traps: Above a certain threshold level of income (e.g., in Honduras estimated at roughly $250 per person per year), households manged to recover their pre-disaster level of assets. Households with annual incomes below this threshold were unable to fully recover their pre-disaster asset levels even in the long term.

Along the same lines, Dercon (2004) presents evidence from the 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia, as a consequence of which poor households did not manage to recover to pre-disaster consumption levels for on average ten years. Similar evidence exists for the droughts in 1999 in Ethiopia (Carter, Little, Mogues, & Negatu, 2006), as well between 1991 and 1995 in Tanzania, where more than ten years after the disaster the poorest households faced consumption levels between 17% and 40% lower than pre-disaster (Beegle, Dehejia, & Gatti, 2006). Further evidence for long-term negative impacts on welfare indicators of households, such as consumption, earnings and labour market outcomes, has been presented for Brazil, Honduras, and El Salvador (Mueller & Osgood, 2007; Rodríguez-Meza & González-Vega, 2004; Baez & Mason, 2008; Carter, Little, Mogues, & Negatu, 2006).

These findings on malnutrion as a consequence of disasters have various implications for the link between disasters and poverty outcomes. A weak physical constitution due to early chilhood undernourishment, is argued to result in poorer cognitive skills, reduced life expectancy, and chronic diseases, which in return can all be expected to reduce labor market productivity and lifetime earnings. Hoddinott et al. (2008) manage to capture and quantify this long-term effect on earnings by using data from a nutrition supplementation project in rural Guatemala (1969-1977): they find that those who received nutrition supplements during age one to three, had 46% higher average wages than stunted children. This suggests that if disaster-induced malnutrition affects a child in its critical early-childhood years, it can have a substantial effect on future earnings and productivity – thus, protecting the post-disaster nutrition status of children in low-income households could be an important and cost-effective long-term economic investment. Baez, de la Fuente, and Santos (2010) offer a further comprehensive review of the literature on the long-term effects of disaster related malnutrition.

Similar evidence has been found for the long-term effects of educational outcomes. De Janvry et al. (2006), for instance, present evidence from Mexico for state dependence: Once children have been taken out of school, even if it is only due to a temporary shock, they are 30% less likely to proceed with their education than children who remain at school. This suggests that temporary spending adjustments by poor 14