Tyler Cowen points to a new draft working paper by Emily Oster finding a causal link between exports from a sub-Saharan African country and new AIDS infections: Routes of Infection: Exports and HIV Incidence in Sub-Saharan.
Oster finds that "a doubling of exports leads to as much as a quadrupling in new HIV infections."
Why does this happen?
This relationship is consistent with a model of the epidemic in which truckers and other migrants have higher rates of risky behavior, and their numbers increase in periods with greater exports. I present evidence suggesting that the relationship between exports and HIV is causal and works, at least in part, through increased transit.
There are important policy conclusions:
The result has important policy implications, suggesting (for example) that there is signi cant value in prevention focused on these transit-oriented groups. I apply this result to study the case of Uganda, and argue that a decline in exports in the early 1990s in that country appears to explain between 30% and 60% of the decline in HIV infections. This suggests that the success of the Ugandan education campaign against HIV - the ABC campaign - has been overstated.
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