Does choice of drought index influence estimates of drought-induced cereal losses in India?

Francisco Pereira Fontes, Ashley Gorst, Charles Palmer
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Francisco Pereira Fontes and Charles Edward Palmer

No 274, GRI Working Papers from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment

Abstract: Drought events have critical impacts on agricultural production yet there is little consensus on how these should be measured and defined. This has implications for drought research and policy, which tends to either define droughts purely based on rainfall or focus uniquely on 'hot' droughts when temperature is considered. We develop a flexible, rainfall-temperature drought index which captures all dry events, including a previously overlooked class of drought that we term 'cold' droughts. Our index is applied to a panel dataset of Indian districts over the period 1966-2009. Results suggest a statistically significant relationship between the index and agricultural production. Cold droughts are found to have consistent, negative marginal impacts that are comparable to those of hot droughts. Estimates of average yield losses due to hot droughts are reduced by as much as 33% when cold droughts are omitted. The associated economic costs are even more severely underestimated, by up to 107%.

Date: 2017-08
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: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/ ... 274-Fontes-et-al.pdf

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:lsg:lsgwps:wp274

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GRI Working Papers from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The GRI Administration ().