and 6.9 percent (1994-96). Using a similar approach, they also report increases in the mortality of the elderly, ranging from 2 to 8 percent.<sup>25</sup> Two papers look at the impact of sudden changes in the price of coffee on child health and mortality in coffee-growing areas. The first of these, by Maluccio (2005), discusses the impact of the sharp reduction in the price of coffee between 2000-02 on child nutritional status in coffee-growing areas in Nicaragua. Maluccio shows that the coffee price shock, and the attendant reduction in living standards, came hand in hand with a decline in the height-for-age z- score of children aged 6 to 48 months of 0.15 points, although the coefficient is only borderline significant.<sup>26</sup> The results for Mexico and Nicaragua, like those for Peru, suggest a dominance of the (health-reducing) public and private expenditure effects of a recession over the (healthpromoting) “time-for-care” and “lower externalities” effects in Latin America. This is not the case in the analysis by Miller and Urdinola (2007) of the impact of three sudden changes in the price of coffee on infant mortality in coffee-growing areas in Colombia.<sup>27</sup> Miller and Urdinola use population census data to analyze changes in the size of birth cohorts between the year immediately before a coffee price shock and the year of the shock itself. Implicitly, this assumes that the price shocks did not have an effect on the mortality of older children. The analysis also exploits differences between coffee-growing municipalities and other municipalities. The estimation strategy is therefore difference-in-differences (across municipalities and over time). Based on this, Miller and Urdinola conclude that infant mortality is pro-cyclical—increasing when there are positive price shocks (and therefore higher incomes in coffee-growing areas), and decreasing when shocks are negative. This pattern of results is similar to that found in the United

> 25 Additional evidence for the 1994-96 crisis in Mexico reveals that private household expenditures on health care fell more than proportionately at the time (McKenzie, 2006). This may be one of the mechanisms behind the procyclical behavior of health indicators in Mexico, and is direct evidence in support of a movement along the “health production function” in Figure 2, from a point such as A to one such as C. Interestingly, over the same period private expenditure on education actually rose as a share of total consumption, which is also consistent with a prevalence of the (pro-schooling) substitution effect discussed above.

> 26 As with the analysis of changes in school enrollment patterns, these numbers refer to children in the control group, who were ineligible for transfers from the _Red de Protección Social_ .

> 27 These three price shocks correspond to a frost which devastated the coffee crop in Brazil in 1975, and resulted in an increase in coffee prices in Colombia of more than 50 percent; a severe drought in Brazil in 1985, which also led to increases in the price of coffee in Colombia of more than 50 percent; and the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement among producer countries in 1990, which resulted in a decrease in coffee prices in Colombia by approximately one-third.

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