An assessment of Climate change and Crop Productivity in India: A Multivariate Cointegration Framework

Abstract

This paper assess the dynamic relationship between climate change and productivity of four crops, including wheat, rice, coarse cereal and pulse during the period over 1990-2017 in India. To explore relationship between the underlying variables, we adopt the Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds cointegration approach.

The empirical results indicate that long-run relationship between climate change and productivity of underlying crops in India. The outcome reveals that maximum temperature has positive and significant impact on the productivity of underlying crops except for wheat productivity in Indian agriculture. At the same time, minimum temperature has positive and significant impact on the yield of coarse cereal and pulse. Moreover, mean temperature has a significant positive impact on the yield of wheat and coarse cereal, but it has negative impact on rice productivity. In contrast, rainfall has a negative and significant impact on coarse cereal and pulse productivity but positive effect on Wheat productivity. On the contrary, Co2 has a significant positive impact on wheat and pulse productivity in the long run. Thus, empirical evidence indicates that fertiliser and rainfall would adjust any negative shock to agriculture productivity in Indian agriculture.