Empirical Analyses of the Effect of Climate Change on Economic and Political Development in Less Developed Countries
Final Report Abstract
Climate change, the human-caused rise in average global temperatures, has significant effects on crop yields and on livestock, and consequently on nutrition, health, and poverty in most parts of the world. Indirect effects attributed to climate change include social outcomes such as political instability and conflict. Low-income countries are particularly prone to suffer these negative consequences. Understanding the economic and social effects of climate change is an essential first step for designing policies and institutions to deal with these effects. The overarching goal of this project is therefore to expand the empirical knowledge base regarding the economic and political effects of climate change in less developed countries. Climate change is accompanied by shifts in weather patterns and an increase in extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods. The immediate goal of this project is to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of extreme weather events. The empirical basis is formed by data on average weather and deviations from the average weather that are matched with spatially disaggregated individual-level data that measure political and socioeconomic outcomes across a large number of countries and years, namely from DHS and Afrobarometer. Methodologically, I employ econometric techniques from the natural experiments literature to identify causal effects. In the first subproject, I study the effect of weather shocks on political attitudes. This analysis speaks to the possible danger that climate change poses for destabilizing democratic regimes and strengthening authoritarian governments. Existing empirical work is mainly at the macro-level, which entails empirical challenges, including how to measure democracy, transitions between democracy and non-democracy are relatively rare, and how to deal with endogeneity. On the other hand, the literature suggests that effects of weather and climate at the individual level should be considered. In this project, I therefore consider individual-level survey data on political preferences in African countries. The main findings are: First, extreme climate events reduce pro-democratic preferences among individuals in Africa. Second, an instrumental variables strategy suggests that the effects of climate shocks are due to their effect on food security. Together, the analysis suggests a positive effect of economic development on democratic attitudes. In a second project, I study, together with Elisabeth Binder, a doctoral student, differences between the effects of weather shocks on rural and urban livelihoods, with a particular focus on health and nutrition outcomes. Investigating heterogeneous impacts in rural and urban areas helps us to understand potential implications of climate change for rural-urban migration and urbanization. The project is ongoing. Currently, our main finding suggests that results are sensitive to the specification of what constitutes a weather shock, and our analysis currently focuses on the challenges posed by (a) the availability of many different data sets that could potentially be used to measure weather shocks and (b) the many different possible ways to define a weather shock (given a specific data set) that are discussed in the literature.
