Irène Hu

Irène Hu

Environmental economist

Research

Working papers

In the midst of Africa’s mining boom, communities downstream from industrial mines face increased exposure to toxic waste. Yet, the effects of induced water pollution on the local population’s health have not been quantified at the continental scale of Africa, due to data limitation and non-random exposure. This paper investigates this question using a new quasi-experimental design and a novel dataset detailing the location and opening dates of all known industrial mines, obtained through intensive manual data collection. We combine geo-coded information on 2,016 industrial mines with health outcomes from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 1986 to 2018 in 26 African countries. Through a staggered difference-in-difference strategy, we compare villages downstream and upstream of mines before and after their opening and find a 25% increase in 24-month mortality rates downstream. The effect is mainly observed among children who were no longer breastfed, confirming that water pollution drives the results. Our analysis rules out other mechanisms like fertility changes, access to facilities, in-migration, conflicts and income effects. The impact intensifies during mine operation and high international mineral prices, is higher in densely mined regions, and fades out with distance. From a public policy perspective, this paper underscores the significant local costs of mine openings on the environment and the health of the surrounding populations.

The adoption of a capital intensive technology to extract natural resource, competing directly with a more traditional and labour intensive use, can trigger migration in developing countries. This article focuses on the effect of fish stock depletion on migration in Africa. We leverage a novel dataset on fishing intensity to build a panel of the 37 African countries with access to the sea over the period 2012-2018, and we show that within-country variation in fishing intensity increases migration of foreign population flows to OECD countries. We find strong evidence that the competition created by industrial fishing vessels overfishing African seas and depleting fish stocks, increases the flow of foreign population to OECD countries. A 10% increase in the previous year’s fishing effort along an African country’s coast increases the number of migrants towards the OECD by 0.37%. We do not find such effects on refugees, which comforts the story of economic migration only. We then show that macro-level findings are consistent, in terms of mechanisms, with micro-level estimates using household-level demographic data

This paper investigates how official development finance from traditional and emerging donors influences the industrial exploitation of natural resources in Africa. Willingly or not, loans contribute to the local influence a donor country can have in a recipient country, and its companies can benefit from easier access to extract the recipient’s natural resources. Using development finance flows panel data from the OECD countries, China, India and the Gulf countries on the one side, and novel data on industrial extraction of natural resources on the other side. Through an extended descriptive analysis, I find that official development flows from DAC and non-DAC countries are positively correlated with their capacity to conclude large-scale land acquisitions in Africa, over 2000-2014.

Publications