CSRDA:The SSJDA Seminar:The SSJDA Seminar [March 14 (Monday), 2022] "Unpacking the Legacies of Chemical Warfare: Evidence from the Vietnam War″

The SSJDA Seminar [March 14 (Monday), 2022] "Unpacking the Legacies of Chemical Warfare: Evidence from the Vietnam War″

Date & Time: March 14 (Mon), 2022, 11:00－12:00
Venue/Tool: Online(Zoom)
Language: English
Title: Unpacking the Legacies of Chemical Warfare: Evidence from the Vietnam War
Speaker: Duc Tran Anh(Hiroshima University）
Discussant: Junichi Yamasaki (Kobe University), Keisuke Kawata (The University of Tokyo)
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--remains 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. While preliminary, the empirical analysis suggests two persistent patterns: 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.
Registration: Please register with this link
※Registration Deadline : Thursday, March 10, 2022