Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Fluctuations? Evidence from India’s Famine Era
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burgess_donaldson_famines_pp2010_20100111.pdf
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Final author's manuscript
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537.44 KB
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Author(s)
Burgess, Robin
Donaldson, David John
Date Issued
May 2010
Journal
American Economic Review
Citation
Burgess, Robin, and Dave Donaldson. "Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India's Famine Era." American Economic Review (2010) 100(2): 449–53.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A weakening dependence on rain-fed agriculture
has been a hallmark of the economic
transformation of countries throughout history.
Rural citizens in developing countries today,
however, remain highly exposed to fluctuations
in the weather. This exposure affects the
incomes these citizens earn and the prices of the
foods they eat. Recent work has documented
the significant mortality stress that rural households
face in times of adverse weather (Robin
Burgess, Olivier Deschenes, Dave Donaldson,
and Michael Greenstone 2009; Masayuki
Kudamatsu, Torsten Persson, and David
Stromberg 2009). Famines—times of acutely
low nominal agricultural income and acutely
high food prices—are an extreme manifestation
of this mapping from weather to death. Lilian
C. A. Knowles (1924) describes these events as
“agricultural lockouts” where both food supplies
and agricultural employment, on which the
bulk of the rural population depends, plummet.
The result is catastrophic, with widespread hunger
and loss of life.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.449
