Impact of Climate Change on Agricultural Employment in South Asia

Abstract

This study attempts to analyse empirically how economic performance and climate change affect employment in the agriculture sector. The study includes seven South Asian countries’ data, excluding the Maldives, from 1992 to 2021 by applying the most widely used Panel ARDL that involved pooled mean group (PMG) estimation. In the short-run, the effect of past year employment and temperature is positive, whereas GDP per capita is negatively related to agricultural employment and rainfall is insignificant. However, in long the run, the error correction coefficient is significant, and overall data has been able to establish a long-run relationship. The study concludes that with the long-run impact for each country, agricultural employment is negatively affected by GDP per capita and temperature. Lastly, the effect of temperature, in the long run, reveals that climate change has long-term impacts on agriculture employment. We believe that the findings of the study have important implications for policymakers in future.