Quantifying the mortality impact of Il Piano Marshall
利用意大利省级数据,研究发现马歇尔计划每增加一百万美元援助,每千人死亡数减少1-2人,粗死亡率下降3-7%,效果主要由食品和药品援助驱动。
Abstract The Marshall Plan is often hailed as history’s most successful structural adjustment program. However, its direct impacts and its impact on public health outcomes, particularly mortality rates, remain uncertain. Using data for Italian provinces, I find that each additional million dollars in the Italian European Recovery Program was related to a decrease of one to two deaths per 1,000 people or a decline in the Italian crude death rate by 3–7 percent. The effect is driven by the grants in food and drugs (rather than reconstruction grants). This finding is robust to a range of specifications using models in levels and differences, region dummies, placebo tests, a difference-in-differences framework, coarsened exact matching, and a border-municipal research design. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases.