How do African households adapt to climate change? Evidence from Malawi

Aaron M. Cook, Jacob Ricker-Gilbert (jrickerg@purdue.edu) and Juan Sesmero (jsesmero@purdue.edu)

No 150507, 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: We use three waves of national representative household level panel data from Malawi to employ a structural model to estimate how households make land and labor allocation decisions in response to climate change. We first model the allocation of land to improved maize varieties as a function of precipitation history, input and output prices, household characteristics and extension advice and then estimate the welfare benefits associated with this decision in a household net income equation. This second stage also reveals the extent to which the household shift labor off-farm as total growing season precipitation fluctuates. We find that a 1% increase in intra-seasonal precipitation variability reduces household income by 1.5%. This effect falls to 1.3% after we account for the expected adjustment in improved maize adoption.

Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics; Environmental Economics and Policy; International Relations/Trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea13:150507

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.150507

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