Dry Times in Africa: Rainfall and Africa's Growth Performance

Salvador Barrios (), Luisito Bertinelli and Eric Strobl ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: While there have been some references in the literature to the potential role of the general decline in rainfall in sub-Saharan African nations on their poor growth performance relative to other developing countries, this avenue remains empirically unexplored. In this paper we use a new cross-country panel climate data set in an economic growth framework to explore the issue. Our results show that rainfall has been a significant determinants of poor economic growth for Africa but not for other developing countries. Depending on the benchmark measure of potential rainfall, we estimate that the direct impact under the scenario of no decline in rainfall would have resulted in a reduction of between 13 and 36 per cent of today's gap in African GDP per capita relative to the rest of the developing world.

Keywords: Development; Africa; Climate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O55 Q54 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5705/1/MPRA_paper_5705.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dry times in Africa: Rainfall and Africa's growth performance (2003)
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:pra:mprapa:5705

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().