On Friday, September 25th , Edouard Pignède will defend his thesis entitled “The poverty-environment trap: Climate change, natural resources, and population dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa”.
This dissertation is composed of four chapters that study the interactions between the environmental challenges faced by Sub-Saharan countries, in particular the adaptation to climate change and the exploitation of natural resources, and population and economic dynamics.
This first chapter explores how weather shocks impact inequality in Ethiopia and Malawi. Using a new approach of causal inference, which extends the difference-in-differences method to the entire income distribution, it shows how drought events exacerbate inequalities in these two countries. This increase in inequality is driven by the ability of the richest households to find alternative income sources to compensate for their crop income loss. The poorest households, which are unable to access these coping strategies, are strongly impacted by the drought. Consequently, the climate change-induced increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is very likely to exacerbate inequality in developing countries.
Migration has been identified as an adaptation strategy to climate change. However, in reducing households’ resources needed to migrate, climate shocks are also likely to trap households in low-productive areas. The second chapter uses a quantitative spatial model to measure the economic cost of the misallocation of households due to resource-constrained immobility. It shows that climate change could potentially trap as many as 30 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, which would significantly increase the impact of climate change on overall welfare and its distribution over space.
The third chapter analyzes the health-related impact of climate change. Using a quantitative spatial model, it quantifies the mortality impact of climate change, taking into account general equilibrium effects and household adaptation. The results show that climate change could provoke the death of several hundred thousand individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly due to the increase in the incidence of malaria and undernutrition.
Finally, the fourth chapter explores the causal relationship between artisanal mining, a highly developed activity in Sub-Saharan Africa, and urbanization since 1975. Using satellite data on human settlements and geological data on gold suitability layers, it shows how artisanal mining is a major driver of decentralized urbanization of small towns in remote areas. These cities are characterized by low living standards and limited industrial development, which is another potential channel of the resource curse.
AgroParisTech, Campus Agro Paris-Saclay, 22 place de l’Agronomie, Palaiseau, Room B1.01, 13h 30