CONTEXT

Rainfall shocks pose a threat to farmers in rural West Africa especially in the wake of the recurrent climate variability and its impacts on agricultural production. Despite the harm they pose, limited empirical studies exist on the welfare implications of rainfall shocks on farmers' welfare in West Africa. In addition, the potential impacts of rainfall induced commodity and labor market failures have not been given much attention in the empirical literature.

OBJECTIVE

Our study aimed to analyze the impact of negative rainfall shocks and commodity and labor market failures on farm households' welfare in northern Ghana. Examining the impact of commodity and labor market failures amidst the experience of a negative rainfall shock helps to identify the possible entry points through which the adverse impacts of rainfall deficits may be reduced.

METHODS

The study is based on a household survey data from the Africa Rising program, historical daily climate data from the CCAFS-Climate data portal and random rainfall distributions from Monte Carlo simulation. A total of 1168 households were considered in the analysis. We analyze the impact of rainfall shocks and the above-mentioned entitlement failures using a static optimization model that incorporates a crop yield response function.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

We found that an increase in the frequency of negative rainfall shocks under a dry future with and without entitlement failures would impact negatively on the total income and consumption levels of both the asset non-poor and asset poor households in the study area. The asset poor households would however bear the brunt of the impact, and the anticipated impact would mostly be yielded through changes in agricultural incomes and expenditure on food purchases. With increasing risk of dry rainfall conditions, total incomes of farmers could decrease by 7.3% to 45.5%. It was found that ignoring potential failures in commodity and labor markets lead to over/underestimation of the impacts of major rainfall deficits on the different types of farmers. The impact of rainfall shocks on the welfare of farmers is scenario and cluster dependent.

SIGNIFICANCE

The results have significance for policy formulation and future research. The findings from this study indicate a need for targeting and acknowledgement of the differential impacts of climate shocks on the different farmer groups. Efforts made in future research to incorporate entitlement failures in climate impact studies could produce more informative guide for effective policy formulation.

中文翻译：

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降雨冲击和家庭福利：来自加纳北部的证据

语境

降雨冲击对西非农村的农民构成威胁，特别是在反复出现气候变化及其对农业生产的影响之后。尽管它们造成了危害，但关于降雨冲击对西非农民福利的影响的实证研究有限。此外，降雨引起的商品和劳动力市场失灵的潜在影响在实证文献中并未得到太多关注。

客观的

我们的研究旨在分析负降雨冲击以及商品和劳动力市场失灵对加纳北部农户福利的影响。在经历负面降雨冲击的情况下检查商品和劳动力市场失灵的影响有助于确定可能的切入点，通过这些切入点可以减少降雨不足的不利影响。

方法

该研究基于来自非洲崛起计划的家庭调查数据、来自 CCAFS-气候数据门户的历史每日气候数据以及来自蒙特卡罗模拟的随机降雨分布。分析中总共考虑了 1168 个家庭。我们使用包含作物产量响应函数的静态优化模型分析降雨冲击和上述权利失效的影响。

结果与结论

我们发现，在有和没有权利失效的干旱未来下，负降雨冲击频率的增加将对研究区域内资产非贫困家庭和资产贫困家庭的总收入和消费水平产生负面影响。然而，资产贫困家庭将首当其冲，预期的影响将主要通过农业收入和粮食购买支出的变化产生。随着干旱降雨条件的风险增加，农民的总收入可能会下降 7.3% 至 45.5%。研究发现，忽视商品和劳动力市场的潜在失败会导致高估/低估主要降雨不足对不同类型农民的影响。降雨冲击对农民福利的影响取决于情景和集群。

意义

研究结果对政策制定和未来研究具有重要意义。这项研究的结果表明，需要针对和承认气候冲击对不同农民群体的不同影响。在未来的研究中努力将权利失败纳入气候影响研究，可以为有效的政策制定提供更多信息指南。