Temperature and Income: Reconciling New Cross-Sectional and Panel Estimates
It has long been observed that hot countries tend to be poor. A correlation between heat and poverty was noted as early as Charles de Montesquieu (1750) and Ellsworth Huntington (1915), and it has been repeatedly demonstrated in contemporary data (e.g., William D. Nordhaus 2006). Looking at a...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
American Economic Association
2011
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61740 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1918-4631 |
| Summary: | It has long been observed that hot countries
tend to be poor. A correlation between heat
and poverty was noted as early as Charles de
Montesquieu (1750) and Ellsworth Huntington
(1915), and it has been repeatedly demonstrated
in contemporary data (e.g., William D. Nordhaus
2006). Looking at a cross section of the world in
the year 2000, national income per capita falls
8.5 percent per degree Celsius rise in temperature
(see Table 2 below). In fact, temperature
alone can explain 23 percent of the variation in
cross-country income today. |
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