Replication Data for: Public Health, Human Capital, and Economic Growth: The Lasting Effects of Disease Control in China

This paper investigates the long-term impacts of China’s nationwide public health campaigns targeting malaria, measles, and meningitis between the 1960s and 1980s. Exploiting regional variation in pre-campaign disease prevalence across birth cohorts, we show that these interventions generated sizable improvements in education, cognition, health, and income. As an illustrative case, individuals from high-malaria regions who were fully exposed to the eradication campaign attained about 0.5 additional years of schooling and earned over 10% higher income in adulthood, with cognitive and schooling gains explaining a substantial share of the income effects. Extending the same approach to measles and meningitis vaccination campaigns reveals comparably large benefits, with internal rates of return ranging from 21% to 34%. Together, these findings highlight the lasting socioeconomic returns to early-life health interventions and underscore the role of public health as a foundation for human capital accumulation and long-run economic growth.