The health consequences of civil wars: evidence from Afghanistan

The health consequences of civil wars: evidence from Afghanistan

This study examines the effects of long-run civil wars on healthcare, which is an important component of human capital development and their causality nexus in Afghanistan using the MVAR (modified vector autoregressive) approach
and the Granger non-causality model covering data period 2002Q3-2020Q4. The primary results support a signifcant
long-run relationship between variables, while the results of the MVAR model indicate the per capita cost of war, per
capita GDP, and age dependency ratio have signifcantly positive impacts on per capita health expenditures, whereas
child mortality rate and crude death rate have negative impacts. The results of the Granger non-causality approach
demonstrate that there is a statistically significant bidirectional causality nexus between per capita health expenditure, per capita cost of war, per capita GDP, child mortality rate, crude death rate, and age dependency ratio, while it also supports the existence of strong and significant interconnectivity and multidimensionality between per capita cost of war and per capita health expenditure, with a significantly strong feedback response from the control variables. Important policy implications sourced from the key findings are also discussed.

This article is part of a UniSQ Thesis by publication. See Related Output.