La asociación entre agua y crecimiento económico: evidencia de latinoamérica.

Abstract

A wide and extensive literature has documented a negative association between rising global temperatures and economic growth. Much of these studies see temperature as a weather element that is both fixed and exogenous in the short run. And while precipitation has also been analyzed, the results from this branch of literature are ambiguous. This study provides an investigation of precipitation by taking a different approach, using a panel of 20 Latin American countries. Our empirical strategy relies on exogenous changes of rainfall seasonality, which is how much rainfall is temporally concentrated over the year within a particular location. We associate changes of precipitation with economic outcomes not only on the amount of rain for a given year, but on how evenly distributed it is across the year. To account its spatial distribution, we show that changes in relative rainfall seasonality are positively related with economic growth using disaggregated measures of production. On average, when locations have changes in rainfall seasonality they experience as much as a 14% increase in economic growth as opposed to locations that do not. We also find that variability in the average amount of rainfall is consistently associated with a lower rate of growth.