Effect of Austerity Measures on Infant Mortality: Evidence From Greece
Robert J Kolesar, Rok Spruk · 2026
Read Effect of Austerity Measures on Infant Mortality: Evidence From Greece by Robert J Kolesar, Rok Spruk (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13327493.txt.
Description
Robert Kolesar and Rok Spruk measure what deep budget cuts did to infant survival in Greece. Their 2026 paper treats the aid-led austerity program that began in 2010 as a near-experiment. A synthetic control builds a stand-in Greece from like countries that skipped such deep cuts. Any gap between real Greece and its stand-in then reads as the program's total effect. The gap opens at once and lasts.
Infant deaths run far above the stand-in path for a decade, with an average rise of more than two-fifths. Boys suffer more than girls, and deaths cluster in the first month of life. Counting the fall in births, the team tallies hundreds of excess infant deaths across the decade. Wide checks back the result. The authors argue early-life health needs explicit guarding when budgets are cut hard.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Robert J Kolesar, Rok Spruk |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 65 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |