Agricultural productivity and climate shocks in developing countries

Abstract

This dissertation contains three chapters studying factors limiting agricultural productivity in developing countries. Climate change is a significant threat for the developing world countries, and agricultural households experience changes in their productive context, forcing them to adapt to the new environment. Governments and international organizations have been coordinating their efforts to reduce and temper the effects of these shocks by investing in infrastructure, in the development of markets and favoring the adoption of new production practices. The overall goal of this thesis is to understand how weather shocks affect agricultural productivity and how adaptation and mitigation work in the context of climate change. In the first chapter, I compile a novel dataset on irrigation dams to study the role of irrigation on mitigating the effect of climate shocks on civil conflict in Indonesia. In the second chapter, I use a novel combination of primary panel data and crop simulations to decompose farmers’ yield gaps to measure how much of the gap is driven by risk aversion. In the third paper, I study the impact of a demand shock on agricultural inputs markets in Zambia.