The impact of climate change on crop production in Ghana: A Structural Ricardian analysis

Type Report
Title The impact of climate change on crop production in Ghana: A Structural Ricardian analysis
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2017
URL http://www.otago.ac.nz/economics/otago642357.pdf
Abstract
We apply a Structural Ricardian Model (SRM) to farm-level data from Ghana in order to
estimate the impact of climate change on crop production. The SRM explicitly incorporates
changes in farmers’ crop selection in response to variation in climate, a feature lacking in
many existing models of climate change response in Africa. Two other novel features of our
model are an estimate of the response of agricultural profits to differences in land tenure, and
a comprehensive investigation of the appropriate functional form with which to model
farmers’ responses. This final feature turns out to be important, since estimates of the effect
of climate change turn out to be sensitive to the choice of functional form.

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