Trends in Rainfall and Economic Growth in Africa: A Neglected Cause of the African Growth Tragedy

By Salvador Barrios, Luisito Bertinelli, Eric Strobl. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010

407 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the role of rainfall trends in poor growth performance of sub-Saharan African nations relative to other developing countries, using a new cross-country panel climatic data set in an empirical economic growth framework. Our results show that rainfall has been a significant determinant of poor economic growth for African nations but not for other countries. Depending on the benchmark measure of potential rainfall, we estimate that the direct impact under the scenario of no decline in rainfall would have resulted in a reduction of between around 15 and 40 of today's gap in African GDP per capita relative to the rest of the developing world.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54fb3456d43208b6b9a0c45dcfa373e89c85ee69

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Citations in the corpus

Climate shocks and political violence (2014, background): “Water abundance, in addition to being positively correlated with conflict, is itself a significant predictor of economic growth (Miguel, Satyanath & Sergenti, 2004, Barrios et al., 2010, Author cite).”
Does rainfall matter for economic growth? Evidence from global sub-national data (1990–2014) (2019, unknown): “Aggregation masks heterogeneity of impacts across regions (Barrios et al. 2010) -- a problem termed Modifiable Areal Unit Problem, or MAUP in the economic geography literature (Briant et al.”
The Impact of Weather Anomalies on Migration in sub-Saharan Africa (2012, methodology): “As pointed out by Barrios et al. (2010), anomalies allow one to eliminatepossible scale effects and take account of the likelihood that for the more arid countries variability is large compared to the mean (Munoz-Diaz and Rodrigo, 2004).”
Economic growth, size of the agricultural sector, and urbanization in Africa (2011, unknown): “(2004), Barrios et al. (2010), Brückner and Ciccone (2010, 2011), or Brückner (2011). The quadratic term on the rainfall variable captures that extreme increases in rainfall (flooding) can be detrimental for agricultural production.”
Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century (2012, result): “tragedy (Barrios et al. 2010).”
Conflict, Climate, and Cells: A Disaggregated Analysis (2018, unknown): “[4] Barrios, S.”
Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration (2015, unknown): “Barrios et al (2010) provide evidence that sub-Saharan Africa would have reduced the gap in per capita GDP (by between 15-40”
The GDP-Temperature relationship: Implications for climate change damages (2021, unknown): “(2011), and Belloni et al. (2014). 4See Keynes (1939), Koopmans (1947), Leamer (1978), Leamer (1983), Hendry et al. (1990), Chatfield (1996), and Sullivan et al. (1999), among others. 5For example, Friedman (1953); Varian (2014); Kleinberg et al. (2015); Christensen and Miguel (Forthcoming), and Ath”
The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development (2015, background): “Another strand of literature has emphasized unique African ecological characteristics, such as the prevalence of severe malaria (Gallup and Sachs, 2001) and rainfall variability (Barrios et al., 2010), as longstanding obstacles to African growth.”
Does Education Matter for Economic Growth? (2014, unknown): “[2] Barrios, S.”