Conference Agenda

How costly are droughts to individuals' nutrition in Africa? Do people adapt to recurring droughts? We measure severe drought events using a detailed satellite-based index of greening observed bi-monthly on a relatively high-resolution $0.083\degree$ grid between 1982 and 2015, that captures persistent and severe deficits in soil moisture relative to grid- and time-of-year normal moisture. Across 32 African countries, conditional on individual characteristics, timing relative to growing seasons, irrigation, and local grid-level climate, we show that a severe three-month drought reduces adults' body mass index by 2.5\%. Droughts are worse for underweight and uneducated individuals. In contrast, recurring severe droughts, that happen in locations that have seen droughts before, do not significantly affect adults. The effect is driven by unexpected first-time exposure to droughts. The uneducated are more likely to become unemployed during first-time droughts, whereas both labor reallocation across occupations and migration mitigate the effect of recurring droughts.

Global warming has increasingly negative health effects, particularly in relatively poor and hot countries such as India. These impacts are partly direct, caused by hyperthermia, and partly due to vector-borne diseases and reduced food availability. While numerous harmful health effects of high temperatures have been established, there is very little research on their possible impact on anemia, a medical condition affecting one-quarter of people worldwide and 43% of India’s population. Using health, nutritional and climate data, we analyze the relationship between high temperatures and anemia in India over the past decade. We match blood hemoglobin measures from nearly 259,000 children, 901,000 women and 138,000 men to both dry heat waves (high temperatures) and humid heat waves (combination of high temperatures and humidity). We find that high temperatures exposure in the 30 days preceding the blood measurement worsen anemia in all individuals, especially children and women. Moreover, the mechanisms responsible do not seem to be related to reduced food availability, but malaria could explain part of the relationship between temperature and anemia.

This study addresses the effects of electricity subsidies on energy and monetary poverty in Benin. Drawing upon the household dataset in 2021, we employ the microsimulation approach under the equivalent variation theorem. Our key findings are twofold. Firstly, we reveal that the removal of electricity subsidies would trigger an upsurge in both energy and monetary poverty. The distributional analysis further underscores that households located in urban areas and those headed by females would be the most affected. Crucially, our investigation suggests an electricity subsidy removal, complemented by an unconditional targeted cash transfer programme, holds the potential to alleviate the adverse social consequences.

The paper estimates the impact of multitier cooking energy solutions on gendered outcomes that include health and time allocation to various household activities. Using the data from the World Bank/ESMAP (2018) on household access to energy in Zambia, the study adopts the Inverse Probability Regression Adjustment (IPWRA) with a generalized propensity score to estimate the pairwise average treatment effect of household access to multitier cooking energy solution on gendered welfare indicators. The results reveal heterogeneity in the effect among women and men welfare indicators and general improvement in multitier access to cooking energy solutions. The disaggregated gender results show that transitioning across tiers affects health outcomes, time allocation to various activities, and drudgery among women and men. Therefore, the study results underscore the need to highlight substantial variations in the impact on gender and location of the households across cooking energy solutions Tiers in policy formulation in transition economies such as Zambia.