Unpacking the Legacies of Chemical Warfare: Evidence from the Vietnam War

• In Event: Conflict Modeling, Prediction and Forecasting

Abstract

How does exposure to wartime violence shape subsequent socioeconomic outcomes? Despite the growing scholarly interests in the legacies of war, the long-run effects of the herbicide spray in the Vietnam War — the most massive usage of chemical weapons and indiscriminate violence in human history — remain understudied. We investigate the legacies of chemical warfare by exploiting the spray flight-level archival records, originally georeferenced historical maps, and the historical fact that the US prohibited herbicide spraying beyond the Cambodia-Vietnam border. Using a number of identification strategies, including a regression kink (RK) design leveraging the flight-level variation, we find two persistent patterns: The herbicide exposure during the 1961-1971 period is negatively associated with (1) population growth, as a proxy of urbanization, and, to a lesser extent, (2) nightlight luminosity growth, as a proxy of economic growth, in the present day.

Author

• Gaku Ito, Osaka Metropolitan University