The Welfare Cost of Drought in Sub-Saharan Africa

Jon Gascoigne, Sandra Baquie, Katja Pauliina Vinha, Emmanuel Skoufias, Evie Isabel Neall Calcutt, Varun Sridhar Kshirsagar, Conor Meenan and Ruth Hill

No 10683, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper quantifies the impact of drought on household consumption for five main agroecological zones in Africa, developing vulnerability (or damage) functions of the relationship between rainfall deficits and poverty. Damage functions are a key element in models that quantify the risk of extreme weather and the impacts of climate change. Although these functions are commonly estimated for storm or flood damages to buildings, they are less often available for income losses from droughts. The paper takes a regional approach to the analysis, developing standardized hazard definitions and methods for matching hazard and household data, allowing survey data from close to 100,000 households to be used in the analysis. The damage functions are used to quantify the impact of historical weather conditions on poverty for eight countries, highlighting the risk to poverty outcomes that weather variability causes. National poverty rates are 1–12 percent higher, depending on the country, under the worst weather conditions relative to the best conditions observed in the past 13 years. This amounts to an increase in the total poverty gap that ranges from US$4 million to US$2.4 billion (2011 purchasing power parity).

Date: 2024-01-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/09932530 ... 002156b672eb8155.pdf (application/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:wbk:wbrwps:10683

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().