Impact assessments of policy interventions on agricultural commodity prices are carried out by international organizations using nationwide measures which overlook the effects of spatial heterogeneity in incomplete markets. We introduce a multi-step methodology to build spatially-disaggregated nominal rates of protection in a data-scarce environment and test it along the maize value chain in Uganda. Results confirm that the spatial dispersion of farmers plays a key role in determining heterogeneity in nominal rates of protection. This finding has far-reaching policy implications: i) the assumption of a nationally representative market pathway is unrealistic; ii) pan-national interventions may exacerbate, rather than reduce, price distortions.

Using the LSMS-ISA Tanzania National Panel Survey by the World Bank, we study the relationship between rural household consumption growth and temperature shocks over the period 2008 – 2013. Temperature shocks have a negative and significant impact on household growth only if their initial consumption lies below a critical threshold. As such, temperature shocks slow income convergence among households. Agricultural yields and labour productivity are the main transmission channels. These findings support the Schelling Conjecture: economic development would allow poor farming households to cope with climate change, and closing the yield gap and modernizing agriculture is crucial for adaptation to the negative impacts of global warming.

Recently it has been hypothesized that climate change will affect total factor productivity growth. Given the importance of TFP for long-run economic growth, if true this would entail a substantial upward revision of current impact estimates. Using macro TFP data from a recently developed dataset in Penn World Tables, we test this hypothesis by directly examining the nature of the relationship between annual temperature shocks and TFP growth rates in the last decades. The results show a negative relationship only in poor countries. While statistically significant, the estimate upper bound is a reduction of TFP growth is less than 0.1%, i.e., climate change will decelerate but not reverse economic growth. This finding increases concerns over the distributional issues of future impacts, and restates the case for complementarity between climate policy and poverty reduction.

Using the LSMS-ISA Tanzania National Panel Survey by the World Bank, we study the relationship between rural household consumption growth and temperature shocks over the period 2008 – 2013. Temperature shocks have a negative and significant impact on household growth only if their initial consumption lies below a critical threshold. As such, temperature shocks slow income convergence among households. Agricultural yields and labour productivity are the main transmission channels. These findings support the Schelling Conjecture: economic development would allow poor farming households to cope with climate change, and closing the yield gap and modernizing agriculture is crucial for adaptation to the negative impacts of global warming.