Ingrid Dallmann presented her work “Dengue, Weather and Urbanization in Brazil” at the Environmental Economics Lunch in Paris School of Economics, on October 1st, and at the 2nd FAERE Annual Conference, organized by the Toulouse Business School that took place in Toulouse, on 10-11 September, 2015.
Abstract: Since two decades, the population affected by dengue disease is exponentially increasing and dengue is now affecting more than 390 million people in the world. It ranks behind malaria as the second most important vector-borne disease in the world and the first one in Latin America. Despite the important economic and social cost of the uncontrollable growth of the disease, little economic analysis has been devoted to it. In addition to weather, socio-economic factors such as urbanization and sanitary systems play an important role in the proliferation of dengue. In this paper, I measure the impact of weather and urbanization factors on dengue incidence in Brazilian states during the 1992-2012 period, since Brazil is the most affected country in Latin America. I find a positive and statistically significant effect of different weather factors (temperature, vapour pressure, temperature anomalies) and population density. An augmentation of 1% of the population density will increase the dengue incidence by 3%. The results indicate the presence of an urban heat island effect on dengue proliferation. I find also statistically significant support for a negative impact of education and income on dengue proliferation.