The long-run impacts of temperature and rainfall on agricultural growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Agricultural sector is significant for Sub-Saharan African countries and is highly exposed and sensitive to climate change. This study aims to investigate the overall long-run impacts of temperature and precipitation on agricultural growth in 32 Sub-Saharan African countries. As proposed by Chudik and Pesaran, our estimations are based on augmented autoregressive distributed lag(ARDL) modelling and panel estimators with multifactor error structures. We estimate the “dynamic common correlated long-run effects (DCCE)” through the cross-sectionally augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) approach as well as through the cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL). For robustness check, we also consider the cross-sectionally augmented error correction method (CS-ECM) and the common dynamic process augmented mean group (AMG). The study suggests that rising temperatures have significantly developed a negative long-term relationship with the agricultural growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, the long-run effect of precipitation is less important and not statistically significant in most estimations. According to the CS-DL approach, the negative impact of a 1◦ Crise in temperature could be as high as a 4.2 to 4.7 percentage point decrease in the agricultural growth rate. The results indicate that the warming climate has considerably damaged the agrarian activities in Sub-Saharan Africa, necessitating adaptive climate measures to avoid any food scarcity or economic stagnation in agricultural driven African countries.