Negative Rainfall Shocks Research Articles

Nutrition Matters: Numeracy, Child Nutrition and Schooling Efficiency in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Long Run

School enrolment has increased at an unprecedented scale in Sub-Saharan Africa but learning and the associated education efficiency have not. Given that resources are limited, the efficient use of inputs is of utmost importance for sustainable development. Hence, we investigate whether improvements in children’s nutrition can improve learning and hence efficiency. To assess this relationship, we employ average female height as our proxy for nutrition during childhood. For learning, we estimate numeracy and efficiency using a linearized version of the Whipple Index. Our data is at the subnational level focusing on the birth decades from 1950 to 1999. To deal with the endogeneity of nutrition, we use an instrumental variable approach. Our instrument is negative rainfall shocks during childhood which can adversely affect nutrition. We find that better nutrition increases education efficiency. Therefore, investments in nutrition can advance self-sustaining long-term growth based on human capital in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sustaining enrolment when rains fail: School feeding, rainfall shocks and schooling in Malawi

Emerging evidence suggests that rural children, especially older girls in low-income countries, are at risk of being withdrawn from school when adverse weather-related events occur. Identifying actions that mitigate the adverse effects of weather shocks on schooling, therefore, is critical for sustaining equitable human capital formation. In this paper, we use four waves of household and community panel survey data, merged with long-term, spatially explicit rainfall data to investigate whether access to school feeding programmes (SFP) in Malawi supports primary school enrolment when negative rainfall shocks occur. We find some evidence that access to SFP increases enrolment for older children when their households experience anomalously low rainfall conditions compared to those without SFP. The positive associations of SFP on enrolment persist when we consider historical shocks over longer periods. When we disaggregate by sex, however, there are no differentials. The findings suggest that SFPs, already a common intervention in many contexts, may have modest potential for improving primary school completion rates, educational advancement and human capital formation in the context of a rapidly changing climate.

Impact of early life shocks on educational pursuits-Does a fade out co-exist with persistence?

Changes in climatic conditions have increased the variability in rainfall patterns worldwide. A negative rainfall shock faced by children in the initial 1000 days of life and the resulting malnutrition can harm the likelihood of children's survival, overall growth, development of the brain, motor skills, and cognitive abilities, leading to poor performance in education and labor market. While the existing findings about the long-run outcomes are mixed, it is essential to understand the nuances in such an estimation. Using the exogenous variation in rainfall in India, we estimate the impact of adverse shocks at birth on the cognitive abilities of children at ages 5, 8, 12, and 15, on educational attainments, and the likelihood of studying STEM at higher secondary school. The Young Lives Survey data from Andhra Pradesh, India, presents evidence of the negative impact of rainfall shocks at birth on cognitive abilities from age 5 to 8, attenuating at age 12. Using nationally representative data, while we investigate the impact of adverse rainfall shocks at birth on academic performance measured by the high school grades and STEM choice at higher secondary school, we do not find a persistent impact. We unfold the impact of rainfall shocks on a chain of outcomes connected to long-run educational pursuits, as it helps to identify the most crucial stage for policymaking. Since STEM subjects are strongly associated with the labor market, connecting the association with early life shocks seems to be an essential addition to the literature. While we find evidence of reduced cognitive abilities in the early years, those do not seem to persist in the long run. The potential sample selection or attrition biases and the estimates of those biases can explain the nuances of estimating the long-run impact of adverse shocks at birth.

Climate Shocks and Social Networks: Understanding Adaptation among Rural Indian Households

This paper seeks to uncover the impact of negative rainfall shocks on household social network relationships. I leverage the uncertainty generated from fluctuating long-term rainfall patterns across India, to estimate the impact of heightened climate risks on investments in social network relationships. In so doing, I attempt to disentangle the “direct” and “adaptive” impacts of climate shocks on social network relationships. I found that households that experience higher than average negative rainfall shocks (lower than average rainfall levels over the long term) tend to invest more in family–caste and vertical or linked network relationships. These network relationships were also found to be associated with greater access to financial credit, credit sourced specifically from family members, higher reported collaboration, more diversified businesses, and the use of private irrigation technologies, all of which are key to mitigating the negative impacts of climate shocks. Unlike past research, these results suggest that households’ decisions to invest in social networks may be an adaptive response to higher climate risk. In terms of policy implications, these results highlight the importance of strengthening and supporting family-based and linked networks (such as links to local governmental agencies and extension services) in the face of higher climate risks.

Weather shocks and food price seasonality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Niger

Semi-Arid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa are vulnerable to weather shocks, especially rural areas where households depend on rainfed agriculture and access to stable food markets are limited by high transaction costs. Understanding how weather shocks affect rural Sub-Saharan African households through both production and market price changes is crucial in designing sustainable and effective programs to increase resilience. Weather shock impacts on agricultural production and market prices are well documented in Africa. But little is known about the impacts of weather shocks on market price seasonality, which is an important determinant of food security. We investigate the distinct impacts of positive and negative rainfall shocks on millet production and millet price seasonality in Niger using district-level longitudinal production and price data, along with high-resolution rainfall data. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in seasonal rainfall from historical averages is associated with declines in millet market price initially after harvest, but strong upward pressure on market prices 6 months after harvest. As a result, drought exacerbates existing price seasonality, which in turn can amplify negative impacts on households. Social protection programs need to account for potential increases in seasonal price variability in the design of programs to enhance household resilience to weather shocks.

Rainfall shocks, child mortality, and water infrastructure.

I study the effect of rainfall shocks on child mortality at a sub-national level for a global set of developing countries. I establish that negative (positive) shocks to rainfall lead to an increase (drop) in child deaths overall. Low-income countries (LICs) and the group of countries reliant on agriculture are affected the most due to negative rainfall shocks. In LICs, the impact of negative rainfall shocks is mitigated by around 60% in districts located downstream to dams, an effect predominant among less affluent districts; in addition, the effect of rainfall fluctuations is persistent, lasting for up to three years following the shock. Results remain robust to the inclusion of relevant controls, to the consideration of relevant issues such as selective fertility and migration, and various other robustness tests.

Rainfall shocks and fertilizer use: a district level study of India

AbstractIn the context of climate change and increasing occurrences of extreme events, it is essential to understand farmers' responses to weather shocks and adaptations. This paper uses a panel dataset of 311 selected Indian districts ranging from 1966 to 2009 to investigate how application of chemical fertilizers varies in response to rainfall shocks. Two rainfall shock measures are constructed based on deviation in rainfall from the normal, a categorical measure of rainfall shock; and another, a continuous index of negative rainfall deviation. Based on a panel fixed effect regression, the study finds no apparent reduction in the level of fertilizer use in negative rainfall shock years. However, with a one-year lagged rainfall shock, a reduction in fertilizer application rate is observed for the continuous drought index. Further, exposure to higher intensity droughts in the previous year leads to an increase in the amount of fertilizer application in the current year.

Assessing the long- and short-run asymmetrical effects of climate change on rice production: empirical evidence from India

In recent years, environmental change has arisen as a ubiquitous problem and gained environmentalist's attention across the globe due to its long-term harmful effects on agricultural production, food supply, water supply, and livelihoods of rural households. The present study aims to explore the asymmetrical dynamic relationship between climate change and rice production with other explanatory variables. Based on the time series data of India, covering the period 1991-2018, the current study applied the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model and Granger causality approach. The results of the NARDL reveal that mean temperature negatively affects rice production in the long run while positively affecting it in the short run. Furthermore, positive shocks in rainfall and carbon emission have negative and significant impacts on rice production in the long and short run. In comparison, negative rainfall shocks significantly affect rice production in the long and short run. Wald test confirms the asymmetrical relationship between climate change and rice production. The Granger causality test shows feedback effect among mean temperature, decreasing rainfall, increasing carbon emission, and rice production. While no causal relationship between increasing temperature and decreasing carbon emission. Based on the empirical investigations, some critical policy implications emerged. Toward sustainable rice production in India, there is a need to improve irrigation infrastructure through increasing public investment and to develop climate-resilient seeds varieties to cope with climate change. Along with, at the district level government should provide proper training to farmers regarding the usage of pesticides, the proper amount of fertilizers, and irrigation systems.

Cash Transfers, Negative Rainfall Shocks and Child Welfare in Ethiopia

Abstract This study examines the role of cash transfers in mitigating the welfare impact of negative rainfall shocks on children in rural households. Household-level panel data, obtained from areas where Ethiopia’s Social Cash Transfer Pilot Programme operated, are merged with available climate data. The results from a two-way fixed effects model reveal that cash transfers significantly reduce the negative effect of drought on food consumption Z-score of children in beneficiary households. As the magnitude of drought increases, however, no difference in children’s FCS Z-score is found between beneficiary and non-beneficiary households. The study provides evidence for household food consumption-based coping strategies as a mechanism. As such, beneficiary households are able to avoid food consumption-destabilising coping strategies as long as the droughts they experience are not of high magnitude. The findings of this study offer policy-relevant insights into the extent to which cash transfers can buffer the adverse welfare impact of drought on children.

Missing women in India: Gender-specific effects of early-life rainfall shocks

• The sex ratio in India remains heavily skewed toward men, despite economic growth and other changes over the past decades. • We examine the impact of rainfall shocks around the birth-year on female mortality, using district-level data on cohorts. • We find higher mortality for women from both positive and negative rainfall shocks, especially in places favoring male more. • This accounts for 3.01% of the total estimate of 38.46 million missing women in India (averaged over 1990, 2000 and 2010). • Our results suggest the need to target girls in disaster relief efforts, especially in areas with greater male preference. We link over a century of monthly precipitation data (1911–2011) to the population by gender and age at the district level in the 1991, 2001, and 2011 Indian censuses to study how early-life (around birth year) rainfall shocks affect cohorts’ population sex ratios. Using an approach (from Bhalme and Mooley 1980) that generates separate indices for excess (wet) as well as negative (dry) rainfall shocks and adjusts for the level of persistence in monthly shocks, we find that both too much and too little rainfall are associated with lower relative female population. The results are robust to using alternative rainfall shock indices and different sets of fixed effects. We estimate about 1.156 million missing women due to differential effects of early-life rainfall shocks, which is about 3.01% of the total estimate of 38.46 million missing women (average over 1990, 2000 and 2010) from Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015). Our results suggest the need for targeting aid for weather shocks towards girls, especially in regions with indicators suggesting stronger male preference.

Rainfall shocks and household welfare: Evidence from northern Ghana

CONTEXTRainfall shocks pose a threat to farmers in rural West Africa especially in the wake of the recurrent climate variability and its impacts on agricultural production. Despite the harm they pose, limited empirical studies exist on the welfare implications of rainfall shocks on farmers' welfare in West Africa. In addition, the potential impacts of rainfall induced commodity and labor market failures have not been given much attention in the empirical literature. OBJECTIVEOur study aimed to analyze the impact of negative rainfall shocks and commodity and labor market failures on farm households' welfare in northern Ghana. Examining the impact of commodity and labor market failures amidst the experience of a negative rainfall shock helps to identify the possible entry points through which the adverse impacts of rainfall deficits may be reduced. METHODSThe study is based on a household survey data from the Africa Rising program, historical daily climate data from the CCAFS-Climate data portal and random rainfall distributions from Monte Carlo simulation. A total of 1168 households were considered in the analysis. We analyze the impact of rainfall shocks and the above-mentioned entitlement failures using a static optimization model that incorporates a crop yield response function. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONWe found that an increase in the frequency of negative rainfall shocks under a dry future with and without entitlement failures would impact negatively on the total income and consumption levels of both the asset non-poor and asset poor households in the study area. The asset poor households would however bear the brunt of the impact, and the anticipated impact would mostly be yielded through changes in agricultural incomes and expenditure on food purchases. With increasing risk of dry rainfall conditions, total incomes of farmers could decrease by 7.3% to 45.5%. It was found that ignoring potential failures in commodity and labor markets lead to over/underestimation of the impacts of major rainfall deficits on the different types of farmers. The impact of rainfall shocks on the welfare of farmers is scenario and cluster dependent. SIGNIFICANCEThe results have significance for policy formulation and future research. The findings from this study indicate a need for targeting and acknowledgement of the differential impacts of climate shocks on the different farmer groups. Efforts made in future research to incorporate entitlement failures in climate impact studies could produce more informative guide for effective policy formulation.

Rainfall shocks and children’s school attendance: evidence from Uganda

ABSTRACT The increasing frequency of negative rainfall shocks presents households with the challenging choice of whether to send their children to school or to withdraw them in order for them to provide support in the household. We use high-resolution spatial rainfall data matched with the georeferenced Uganda National Panel Survey data to estimate the effect of negative rainfall shocks on children’s school attendance. We find that exposure to negative rainfall shocks significantly reduces children’s school attendance by almost 10%. These results have important policy implications for improving children’s schooling, particularly in geographical areas that receive particularly erratic rainfalls, in Uganda.

Distant Shocks, Migration, and Housing Supply in India

It is hard to estimate housing supply elasticities. India is a particularly useful country to study housing supply because it is large and has a variety of housing typologies. We estimate the supply elasticity of non-durable, durable, and vacant residential housing units in urban India. We use two migration-inducing exogenous events --- negative rainfall shocks and a highway upgrade program --- occurring in a distant state as demand shifters for local urban housing markets. We apply the Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium framework to show that both the negative rainfall shocks and the highway upgrade program in a distant state increase inter-state migration. This increase leads to higher population and household growth, and therefore, higher demand for housing in local urban markets. Our findings are three-fold. First, we estimate the long-term supply elasticity of durable housing in urban India to be 1.64. This estimate is substantially lower than the long-run housing supply elasticity estimates of 6-13 for metropolitan areas in the United States seen in the literature. Second, we find that the supply elasticity of non-durable housing is -0.55. Negative supply elasticity of non-durable housing is consistent with the existence of urban gentrification through the demolition and upgrading of slums. And finally, we estimate the elasticity of vacant residential housing unit supply to be 2.63. We posit that a relatively higher vacant housing unit elasticity indicates speculative building by developers.

Climatic shocks and internal migration - Evidence from 442 million personal records in 64 countries

This paper examines whether and how climatic shocks influence individual migration decisions. We use census microdata across 64 countries over the period 1960 to 2012, covering 442 million individual records, combined with geo-referenced temperature and precipitation data summarised for each origin and destination administrative unit. Migration is identified when an individual changed a place of usual residence one, five or ten years ago to a new major administrative unit in the same country. Given an exceptionally large number of observations, we apply a two-step approach to analyse the relationship between exposure to climatic shocks and migration. First, we use random forest models to uncover that in many countries climatic shocks are as important as better-known individual-level covariates in determining migration decisions. This observation serves as a yardstick for the second step of our analysis. For a subset of countries, where rainfall shocks play an important role in migration, we compare internal migration patterns across time by examining whether a region experiencing positive or negative rainfall shocks observed higher or lower migration. We find that negative rainfall shocks suppress outmigration particularly for low-income countries. The opposite is true for positive rainfall shocks whereby migration is found to increase, especially for lower-income countries. Our finding supports the liquidity constraint argument whereby adverse climatic conditions can disrupt migration financing and consequently suppress ability to migrate.

Effects of drought on infant mortality in China.

This study focuses on Guizhou Province, a region with difficult geographical conditions and poor economic development, to examine the effect of rainfall shocks on contemporaneous infant health and long-run socioeconomic outcomes in China. The study results indicate that negative rainfall shocks are robustly correlated with higher infant mortality and lower birth weight. In the long run, early life rainfall shortages limit an individual's income and housing conditions. The study findings indicate a significant interaction of rainfall shock with the severity of water scarcity. This result implies that drinking water safety is an essential channel through which early life rainfall shocks influence individual health endowments. However, agriculture production is not a likely channel for rainfall effects despite its association with infant mortality. Accordingly, our empirical results suggest that improving public facility coverage will reduce the vulnerability of infant health to adverse rainfall shocks in Guizhou and other developing areas.

Coping with negative shocks and the role of the farm input subsidy programme in rural Malawi

AbstractThis study uses household panel data from Malawi's 2010/11 and 2012/13 Integrated Household Panel Survey to investigate the mitigating role of its Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) against the deleterious impacts of negative rainfall shock on households’ welfare in rural Malawi. The study finds that the FISP has a cushioning role on the negative impact of rainfall shocks. The use of a farm input subsidy scheme enables rural households to substantially increase their food consumption and overall food security, despite the increasing threat of climate change. The results of this study highlight the importance of agricultural policy, such as the FISP, in rural households’ mitigation of weather risk.

No Rain No Gain – How Reduced Rainfall Impacts on Children’s School Attendance in Uganda

The increasing frequency of negative rainfall shocks presents households with a challenge of whether to send their children to school or withdraw them, in order to provide shock-coping support in the household. We use high-resolution spatial rainfall data matched with geo-referenced Uganda National Panel Survey data to estimate the effect of negative rainfall shocks on children’s school attendance. We find that exposure to negative rainfall shocks reduces children’s school attendance by almost 10%. These results have important policy implications for improving children’s schooling in Uganda, particularly in geographical areas that receive highly erratic levels of rainfall.

Cash Transfers, Negative Rainfall Shocks, and Child Food Insecurity in Ethiopia

This paper examines the role that social cash transfers play in mitigating the impact of negative rainfall shocks on the welfare of children in rural households. The study employed panel data that were collected between 2012 and 2014 for the evaluation of the social cash transfer pilot programme (SCTPP) in Tigray regional state of Ethiopia. A follow-up survey was conducted in 2016 to capture the effects of a negative rainfall shock triggered by El Nino weather events, which seriously affected the countries in eastern and southern Africa between the beginning of 2015 and early 2016. The results from the Correlated Random Effects (CRE) model reveal that negative rainfall shocks cause child food insecurity. Cash transfers have positive welfare effect on children after adjusting for the impact of rainfall shocks. In the presence of negative rainfall shocks, children in the beneficiary households are better-off in their food security status than those in the comparison households. The paper provides policy-relevant findings to stimulate dialogue regarding the effectiveness of social cash transfers in enhancing rural households’ capacity to manage the detrimental welfare impacts of negative rainfall shocks on their most vulnerable members.

Did rainfall shocks cause civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa? The implications of data revisions

In their seminal paper, Miguel et al. (2004) found that negative rainfall shocks (measured as negative year-on-year rainfall growth) had caused civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa over the 1981–1999 period. Since then, the rainfall and conflict data they used had undergone multiple revisions. We show that rainfall shocks are no longer statistically significant for civil conflict when the revised data are used. This is true whether we employ a different functional form for rainfall, extend the sample to include more recent observations, use longer lags for rainfall shocks, employ dynamic panel regression, or panel regressions that take into account of cross-sectional dependence. Using rainfall shocks as instruments for growth, we also find that growth is insignificant for civil conflict if the revised data are used. Upon further investigation, we find that updates in the rainfall and conflict data for one or a few countries may alone cause rainfall shocks to lose statistical significance.

Missing Women in India: Gender-Specific Effects of Early Life Rainfall Shocks

We link over a century of monthly precipitation data (1911–2011) to the population by gender and age at the district level in the 1991, 2001, and 2011 Indian censuses to study how early-life (around birth year) rainfall shocks affect cohorts’ population sex ratios. Using an approach (from Bhalme and Mooley 1980) that generates separate indices for excess (wet) as well as negative (dry) rainfall shocks and adjusts for the level of persistence in monthly shocks, we find that both too much and too little rainfall are associated with lower relative female population. The results are robust to using alternative rainfall shock indices and different sets of fixed effects. We estimate about 1.156 million missing women due to differential effects of early-life rainfall shocks, which is about 3.01% of the total estimate of 38.46 million missing women (average over 1990, 2000 and 2010) from Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015). Our results suggest the need for targeting aid for weather shocks towards girls, especially in regions with indicators suggesting stronger male preference.