English

The economic impact of weather and climate

General Economics 2021-05-07 v3 Economics

Abstract

I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production frontier and weather shocks as a source of inefficiency. I test it on a sample of 160 countries over the period 1950-2014. Temperature and rainfall determine production possibilities in both rich and poor countries; positively in cold countries and negatively in hot ones. Weather anomalies reduce inefficiency in rich countries but increase inefficiency in poor and hot countries; and more so in countries with low weather variability. The climate effect is larger that the weather effect.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.13110,
  title  = {The economic impact of weather and climate},
  author = {Richard S. J. Tol},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.13110},
  year   = {2021}
}