Master-thesis-BSE-2022
On November 20 in 2014, Senegal signed a new agreement with the EU allowing for 45 French and Spanish vessels to fish Senegalese waters in exchange for a yearly monetary compensation during the following five years. Being the fish the first source of protein in the country, we argue that this agreement negatively affected the health situation of the local population, being the children one of the most vulnerable targets. Using the DHS individual-level survey data, we analyze the short and medium-term effects of this agreement on anemia prevalence in children under five years old. After conducting a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference approach together with a multinomial logit model, we found that children located in the more directly impacted coastal areas were found to display more negative consequences as compared to their non-coastal counterparts in response to the policy. Concretely, meanwhile after the agreement in 2015 the probability of children in the whole country to have worse levels of anemia was decreasing, when we isolate the effect for the coastal area we found an opposite trend. Overall, we follow the previous literature work on the negative effects of fish agreements in the absence of the proper public policies to support socioeconomically the inhabitants.
Key words: Senegal, Anemia, Children, Fish, SFPA, Difference-in-Difference, Multinomial Logit
Authors: Eric DiSanto, Michel Douaihy, Kimberly Massa Núñnez, Andrea Viñas Soler