Abstract
This paper studies how weather shocks affect agricultural outcomes in Bolivia at the farm-level. Using micro-data from the Bolivian Agricultural Survey of 2008 and 2015, satellite climate data, and a municipality level fixed effects model, we show that weather shocks, such as extreme temperature and extreme rainfall shocks have detrimental effects on Bolivian farmers’ yield. We also study how farmers cope with short-run weather extreme variations. We present our results differentiating by the climate risk areas and the geographic regions of Bolivia. On average, farmers that live in highlands municipalities experience greater reductions in yields and farmers that live in flood-prone municipalities increase the within farm labor supply in agricultural activities to cope with weather shocks. Our findings could orient policies toward mitigating the short-run implications of weather extreme variations.
I would like to thank Alex Armand, Joseph Gomes and Ivan Kim for their collaboration and suggestions. I am extremely grateful with all the staff from Instituto Nacional de Estadística de Bolivia—INE.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Agricultural Productive Units (APU) (Unidades de Producción Agropecuaria, UPA) is defined in the 2013 Report of the Agricultural Census as all land that is used totally or partially in agricultural or livestock activities, regardless of size, tenure or legal status.
- 3.
For example, in lowlands, soybeans account for more than 75% of the cultivated crops; in highlands, 30% is quinoa, 25% is potato, 15% is alfalfa, and 10% is corn; while in valleys, 65% of the cultivated land is dedicated to corn, and 20% to potato.
- 4.
Our results do not change if we include observations below or above this 5 ℃ bound. In fact, as a robustness check we estimate \(t_{u}\) running different regressions with \(0 \le t_{u} \le 10.\)
Abbreviations
- JEL Codes :
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O13; O12; Q12; Q15; Q51; Q54.
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Daga, S. (2020). Weather Shocks’ Impacts on Farm-Level Agricultural Outcomes in Bolivia. In: Durante, J., Rosillo, R. (eds) Natural Disasters and Climate Change. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43708-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43708-4_2
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