Climate Change and Measures of Economic Growth:Solving the Spatial Mismatch Problem

Devina Lakhtakia () and Ross McKitrick
Additional contact information
Devina Lakhtakia: Department of Economics and Finance, University of Guelph, Guelph ON Canada

No 2203, Working Papers from University of Guelph, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: Many studies have been undertaken to quantify the economic costs of climate change. However, while climate data is measured at a grid cell level, economic data are measured at the national level. In order to form correct damage estimates researchers must reconcile the two. Aggregating climate data up to the national level has been the more common approach but results are sensitive to how the averaging is done and the averaging process itself can bias the results. An alternative approach has been to project economic data down to the grid cell level. Nordhaus (2006) developed the G-Econ database to do this, but while it provides considerable spatial detail it provides only four quinquennial observations per cell from 1990 to 2005. We develop herein a model to predict within-grid cell economic activity using national, regional and local economic activity. The latter is measured using a unique dataset showing annual fight volumes at hundreds of urban and rural airports worldwide from 1976 to 2010. We show that the model has a high level of explanatory power and can be used in an iterative algorithm to infill and extrapolate the G-Econ data base to provide annual observations for grid cells in approximately 150 countries over the 1976 to 2010 interval. We supplement this with satellite nightlight data which provides even more spatial detail but over a shorter time frame.

Keywords: Gross cell product; climate change; economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 Q56 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-dem, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-geo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uoguelph.ca/economics/repec/workingpapers/2022/2022-03.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:gue:guelph:2022-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Guelph, Department of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stephen Kosempel ().