The Dynamic Causal Impact of Climate Change on Economic Activity - A Disaggregated Panel Analysis of India

This paper investigates the long-term impact of climate change on Indian economic growth, both at aggregate and dis-aggregated levels across regions and sectors. A simple Ramsey model is built to show that the resource abundance,climatic exposure, and state capacity affecting the rate of resource mobilisation for productivity and efficiency improvement determine regional growth. A crosssectional augmented auto-regressive distributed lag model (CS-ARDL), addressing endogeneity, heterogeneity, and cross-sectional dependence with stochastic trends,employed in 29 major states from 1980 to 2019, confirms a significant and negative impact of temperature rise on total factor productivity and the resultant economic growth. On average, one Celcius degree of temperature rise has depressed economic growth by approximately 3.89%, with substantial variations across states, sectors,and income groups. The variation in labour relations, industrialisation level, forest cover, and debts across the states affecting the ecological damage and efficiency changes in labour and capital differentially has been found responsible for the variation in TFP and the resultant growth. Our estimated coefficients combined with the projected temperature reveal that poorer and less developed states are expected to be more vulnerable than others because of their dependence on agriculture and ecological resources. The GSDP growth is projected to decrease by a range of 5.25% to 24.51% during 2020 to 2100 from the Stringent Mitigation scenario (SSP1-2.6) to the Business-as-Usual scenario (SSP5-8.5). JEL Code: O44, Q54,Q51