Malawi: Systematic analysis of climate and world market shocks

Jan Duchoslav, Eleanor Jones, Henry Kankwamba, Askar Mukashov and James Thurlow

No 3, Economywide Risk Assessment Country Brief from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: This study explores Malawi’s vulnerability to economic and climatic shocks and identifies those contributing most to economic uncertainty. The Malawian Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model was employed to simu late a range of potential economic outcomes under various sampled shock scenarios developed using historical data to capture domestic agricultural yield volatilities and world market prices uncertainty for traded goods. Data mining and machine learning methods were applied to quantify the contribution of each shock to the un certainty of economic outcomes (gross domestic product [GDP], private consumption, poverty, and undernour ishment). Key findings suggest that domestic cereals and oilseeds yield volatility risks are the most important for the uncertainty of total GDP and consumption across all household types except rural low-income households. Rural low-income households’ consumption and poverty are exposed to a wide range of risks, including produc tivity volatility of livestock, yield volatility of oilseeds, cereals, and vegetables and world market price of beverage crops. Finally, for undernourishment outcomes, volatility in the yields of staple cereals is the dominant risk factor for all household types. Understanding how possible shocks would impact various segments of the Malawian economy and population is a critical first step in facilitating discussions on relevant risk mitigation strategies, such as increasing average crop yields, adopting technologies and practices that narrow yield uncertainties, or diversifying production away from risky crops and sectors.

Keywords: shock; economic shock; computable general equilibrium models; agriculture; market prices; poverty; nutrition; crop yield; machine learning; climate; Malawi; Africa; Eastern Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstreams/d763c54f-4583 ... af2cfcce91c/download (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:fpr:ewracb:3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economywide Risk Assessment Country Brief from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().