The impacts of climate variability on welfare in rural Mexico

Emmanuel Skoufias, Katja Vinha and Hector V. Conroy

No 5555, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper examines the impacts of weather shocks, defined as rainfall or growing degree days more than a standard deviation from their respective long-run means, on household consumption per capita and child height-for-age. The results reveal that the current risk-coping mechanisms are not effective in protecting these two dimensions of welfare from erratic weather patterns. These findings imply that the change in the patterns of climatic variability associated with climate change is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the current coping mechanisms even more and thus increase household vulnerability further. The results reveal that weather shocks have substantial (negative as well as positive) effects on welfare that vary across regions (North vs. Center and South) and socio-economic characteristics (education and gender). The heterogeneous impacts of climatic variability suggest that a"tailored"approach to designing programs aimed at decreasing the sensitivity and increasing the capacity of rural households to adapt to climate change in Mexico is likely to be more effective.

Keywords: Health Monitoring&Evaluation; Science of Climate Change; Regional Economic Development; Global Environment Facility; Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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