Social Policies and Adaptation to Extreme Weather: Evidence from South Africa

Suchita Srinivasan ()
Additional contact information
Suchita Srinivasan: Center of Economic Research, ETH Zurich, Zurichbergstrasse 18, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

No 23/381, CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich

Abstract: Can social policies assist households in coping with the effects of extreme weather events? We evaluate the role of the Indigent Program, an income-based social assistance program in South Africa that provided free electricity and water to poor households, in helping rural households adapt to drought conditions, using household-level panel data. We first analyse the impact of eligibility for the program on the likelihood of acquiring access to electricity and piped water, as well as on expenditure on these amenities, and find that program eligibility did not have a significant impact on these measures. While eligibility for the program was largely ineffective in increasing appliance adoption, electricity use, or welfare, we find that eligible households were more likely to use a borehole as their main water source, a result primarily driven by drought-affected households, suggesting a possible adaptation response facilitated by the program. In general, the benefits offered by the program may have only been marginal in facilitating significant adaptation responses, exacerbated by the fact that households in droughtaffected areas may not have enough assets/wealth to purchase durables, or to make complementary investments. Policy implications relate to the effective design of policies to enable access and use of amenities such as electricity and water, and easing access to credit to facilitate adaptation responses, as climatic conditions intensify.

Pages: 68 pages
Date: 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/ ... papers/wp-23-381.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not found UA

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eth:wpswif:23-381

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().