IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecmode/v76y2019icp182-191.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The productivity impact of climate change: Evidence from Australia's Millennium drought

Author

Listed:
  • Sheng, Yu
  • Xu, Xinpeng

Abstract

The economic impact of climate change has usually been estimated based on changes in average weather condition and is often measured in terms of immediate loss of output or profit. Yet little is known about the impact of extreme weather event, in particular its impact on productivity in the medium to long term. Using Australia's Millennium drought as a case of extreme weather event and applying the synthetic control method, we show that severe droughts occurred between 2002 and 2010 has brought down agricultural total factor productivity by about 18 percent in Australia over the period, contributing significantly to the country's long-term slowdown of agricultural total factor productivity growth. Our results highlight the significance of productivity impact of extreme weather events that has been overlooked when accessing the economic impact of climate change.

Suggested Citation

  • Sheng, Yu & Xu, Xinpeng, 2019. "The productivity impact of climate change: Evidence from Australia's Millennium drought," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 182-191.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:76:y:2019:i:c:p:182-191
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2018.07.031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999318305200
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.econmod.2018.07.031?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tasso Adamopoulos & Diego Restuccia, 2014. "The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(6), pages 1667-1697, June.
    2. Yang Dean, 2008. "Coping with Disaster: The Impact of Hurricanes on International Financial Flows, 1970-2002," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-45, June.
    3. Lan Lu & David Hedley, 2004. "The impact of the 2002-03 drought on the economy and agricultural employment," Economic Roundup, The Treasury, Australian Government, issue 1, pages 25-43, April.
    4. Douglas Gollin & David Lagakos & Michael E. Waugh, 2014. "Agricultural Productivity Differences across Countries," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(5), pages 165-170, May.
    5. Stern,Nicholas, 2007. "The Economics of Climate Change," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521700801, September.
    6. Robert M. Solow, 1956. "A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 70(1), pages 65-94.
    7. Garnaut,Ross, 2011. "The Garnaut Review 2011," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107691681, September.
    8. Hughes, Neal & Lawson, Kenton & Davidson, Alistair & Jackson, Tom & Sheng, Yu, 2011. "Productivity pathways: climate-adjusted production frontiers for the Australian broadacre cropping industry," 2011 Conference (55th), February 8-11, 2011, Melbourne, Australia 100563, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.
    9. Tim J. Coelli & D. S. Prasada Rao, 2005. "Total factor productivity growth in agriculture: a Malmquist index analysis of 93 countries, 1980–2000," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 32(s1), pages 115-134, January.
    10. Alberto Abadie & Javier Gardeazabal, 2003. "The Economic Costs of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 113-132, March.
    11. Simon Dietz & Nicholas Stern, 2015. "Endogenous Growth, Convexity of Damage and Climate Risk: How Nordhaus' Framework Supports Deep Cuts in Carbon Emissions," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 0(583), pages 574-620, March.
    12. Kevin Hanslow & Don Gunasekera & Brendan Cullen & David Newth, 2014. "Economic impacts of climate change on the Australian dairy sector," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 58(1), pages 60-77, January.
    13. World Bank, 2015. "World Development Indicators 2015," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 21634.
    14. repec:oup:qjecon:v:129:y:2014:i:2:p:939-993. is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Hayami, Yujiro & Ruttan, Vernon W, 1970. "Agricultural Productivity Differences Among Countries," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 60(5), pages 895-911, December.
    16. V. Eldon Ball & Jean‐Pierre Butault & Carlos San Juan & Ricardo Mora, 2010. "Productivity and international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 41(6), pages 611-627, November.
    17. Melissa Dell & Benjamin F. Jones & Benjamin A. Olken, 2009. "Temperature and Income: Reconciling New Cross-Sectional and Panel Estimates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 198-204, May.
    18. Sheng, Yu & Mullen, John D. & Zhao, Shiji, 2010. "Has growth in productivity in Australian broadacre agriculture slowed?," 2010 Conference (54th), February 10-12, 2010, Adelaide, Australia 59266, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.
    19. Dietz, Simon & Stern, Nicholas, 2015. "Endogenous growth, convexity of damage and climate risk: how Nordhaus’ framework supports deep cuts in carbon emissions," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 58406, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    20. Cashin, Paul & Mohaddes, Kamiar & Raissi, Mehdi, 2017. "Fair weather or foul? The macroeconomic effects of El Niño," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 37-54.
    21. Garnaut,Ross, 2008. "The Garnaut Climate Change Review," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521744447, September.
    22. Kevin J. Fox & Yu Sheng & Tom Jackson & Shiji Zhao & Dandan Zhang, 2017. "Measuring Output, Input and Total Factor Productivity in Australian Agriculture: An Industry-Level Analysis," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 63, pages 169-193, February.
    23. Richard S. J. Tol, 2009. "The Economic Effects of Climate Change," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 23(2), pages 29-51, Spring.
    24. Douglas Gollin & David Lagakos & Michael E. Waugh, 2014. "The Agricultural Productivity Gap," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(2), pages 939-993.
    25. Melissa Dell & Benjamin F. Jones & Benjamin A. Olken, 2012. "Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(3), pages 66-95, July.
    26. V. Ball & Jean-Christophe Bureau & Jean-Pierre Butault & Richard Nehring, 2001. "Levels of Farm Sector Productivity: An International Comparison," Journal of Productivity Analysis, Springer, vol. 15(1), pages 5-29, January.
    27. Nicholas Stern, 2013. "The Structure of Economic Modeling of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change: Grafting Gross Underestimation of Risk onto Already Narrow Science Models," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(3), pages 838-859, September.
    28. Abadie, Alberto & Diamond, Alexis & Hainmueller, Jens, 2010. "Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 105(490), pages 493-505.
    29. King, Gary & Zeng, Langche, 2006. "The Dangers of Extreme Counterfactuals," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 131-159, April.
    30. Salvador Barrios & Luisito Bertinelli & Eric Strobl, 2010. "Trends in Rainfall and Economic Growth in Africa: A Neglected Cause of the African Growth Tragedy," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(2), pages 350-366, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Babyenda, Peter & Kabubo-Mariara, Jane & Odhiambo, Sule, 2023. "Climate variability and agricultural productivity in Uganda," African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, African Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 18(1), April.
    2. Robert G. Chambers & Simone Pieralli & Yu Sheng, 2020. "The Millennium Droughts and Australian Agricultural Productivity Performance: A Nonparametric Analysis," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(5), pages 1383-1403, October.
    3. Zheng, Shanshan & Wang, Derek D., 2024. "The local economic impacts of mega nuclear accident: A synthetic control analysis of Fukushima," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).
    4. C. A. K. Lovell, 2021. "The Pandemic, The Climate, and Productivity," CEPA Working Papers Series WP112021, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    5. Quang-Tuong Vo & Jae-Min So & Deg-Hyo Bae, 2020. "An Integrated Framework for Extreme Drought Assessments Using the Natural Drought Index, Copula and Gi* Statistic," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 34(4), pages 1353-1368, March.
    6. Hughes, Neal & Soh, Wei Ying & Lawson, Kenton & Lu, Michael, 2022. "Improving the performance of micro-simulation models with machine learning: The case of Australian farms," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    7. David A. Fleming‐Muñoz & Stuart Whitten & Graham D. Bonnett, 2023. "The economics of drought: A review of impacts and costs," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 67(4), pages 501-523, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Richard S J Tol, 2018. "The Economic Impacts of Climate Change," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 12(1), pages 4-25.
    2. Melissa Dell & Benjamin F. Jones & Benjamin A. Olken, 2014. "What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 52(3), pages 740-798, September.
    3. Franziska Piontek & Matthias Kalkuhl & Elmar Kriegler & Anselm Schultes & Marian Leimbach & Ottmar Edenhofer & Nico Bauer, 2019. "Economic Growth Effects of Alternative Climate Change Impact Channels in Economic Modeling," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 73(4), pages 1357-1385, August.
    4. Marco Letta & Richard S. J. Tol, 2019. "Weather, Climate and Total Factor Productivity," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 73(1), pages 283-305, May.
    5. Yuventus Effendi & Budy P. Resosudarmo, 2022. "Socio-economic and environmental impact of intended decarbonisation policies in the East Asian region," Departmental Working Papers 2022-03, The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics.
    6. Li Chen & Bin Jiang & Chuan Wang, 2023. "Climate change and urban total factor productivity: evidence from capital cities and municipalities in China," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 401-441, July.
    7. Dietz, Simon & Gollier, Christian & Kessler, Louise, 2018. "The climate beta," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 258-274.
    8. Kahn, Matthew E. & Mohaddes, Kamiar & Ng, Ryan N.C. & Pesaran, M. Hashem & Raissi, Mehdi & Yang, Jui-Chung, 2021. "Long-term macroeconomic effects of climate change: A cross-country analysis," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C).
    9. Bovari, Emmanuel & Giraud, Gaël & Mc Isaac, Florent, 2018. "Coping With Collapse: A Stock-Flow Consistent Monetary Macrodynamics of Global Warming," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 383-398.
    10. De Juan Fernández, Aránzazu & Poncela, Pilar & Rodríguez Caballero, Carlos Vladimir, 2022. "Economic activity and climate change," DES - Working Papers. Statistics and Econometrics. WS 35044, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Estadística.
    11. Armon Rezai & Frederick Van der Ploeg, 2016. "Intergenerational Inequality Aversion, Growth, and the Role of Damages: Occam's Rule for the Global Carbon Tax," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(2), pages 493-522.
    12. Tasso Adamopoulos & Diego Restuccia, 2022. "Geography and Agricultural Productivity: Cross-Country Evidence from Micro Plot-Level Data," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 89(4), pages 1629-1653.
    13. Acevedo, Sebastian & Mrkaic, Mico & Novta, Natalija & Pugacheva, Evgenia & Topalova, Petia, 2020. "The Effects of Weather Shocks on Economic Activity: What are the Channels of Impact?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    14. Martin Henseler & Ingmar Schumacher, 2019. "The impact of weather on economic growth and its production factors," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 154(3), pages 417-433, June.
    15. Kalkuhl, Matthias & Wenz, Leonie, 2020. "The impact of climate conditions on economic production. Evidence from a global panel of regions," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    16. Rising, James A. & Taylor, Charlotte & Ives, Matthew C. & Ward, Robert E.t., 2022. "Challenges and innovations in the economic evaluation of the risks of climate change," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 114941, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    17. Rising, James A. & Taylor, Charlotte & Ives, Matthew C. & Ward, Robert E.T., 2022. "Challenges and innovations in the economic evaluation of the risks of climate change," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    18. Schultes, Anselm & Piontek, Franziska & Soergel, Bjoern & Rogelj, Joeri & Baumstark, Lavinia & Kriegler, Elmar & Edenhofer, Ottmar & Luderer, Gunnar, 2020. "Economic damages from on-going climate change imply deeper near-term emission cuts," MPRA Paper 103655, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. J. Farmer & Cameron Hepburn & Penny Mealy & Alexander Teytelboym, 2015. "A Third Wave in the Economics of Climate Change," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 62(2), pages 329-357, October.
    20. Chang, Jun-Jie & Mi, Zhifu & Wei, Yi-Ming, 2023. "Temperature and GDP: A review of climate econometrics analysis," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 383-392.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Climate change; Millennium drought; Extreme weather events; Total factor productivity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q10 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - General
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:76:y:2019:i:c:p:182-191. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/30411 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.