Economic and Health Impacts of the 2011 Post-Electoral Crisis in Côte d’Ivoire: Evidence from Microdata

Past studies have shown that income shocks can trigger women to embark on commercial sex. This paper studies some microeconomic effects of the Cote d’Ivoire’s political instability in 2011 after the presidential election. We use a unique dataset, collected right before and after the crisis, on individuals sampled in health centers, which, coupled with biomarkers on HIV, allows to evaluate the consequences of the conflict. We first use subjective measures of exposure to document the entity of the crisis. We then analyze the consequence of the crisis on income and consumption during and right after the crisis. We show that individuals engage in transactional sex to make up for income loss. In particular, women who are young, unmarried and without a stable source of income increased their number of sexual partners by 26% and received 44% higher amounts of transfers right after the crisis. In the same line, we also find that the incidence of HIV grew to around 1.2% for women and 0.8% for men in conflict-intensive regions.