Working Paper

(WP4/2024) Temperature, precipitation and food price inflation: Evidence from a panel of countries

In the paper, Meltem and Hulya address a significant gap in the existing literature, which is the association between weather variables, i.e., temperature and precipitation, and food price inflation. Using a monthly dataset that spans 23 years for 186 countries, they explore this relationship in detail.  Their findings reveal three results. First, weather variables play a crucial role in explaining inflation (with temperature having a negative contemporaneous effect on inflation). Two, precipitation appears to have a positive effect.  Three, although the contemporaneous effect is negative, the cumulative inflationary effect of a 1◦C temperature increase can amount to 0.6 percentage points.  Overall, the strength of these associations varies across different inflation quantiles.  Finally, their results demonstrate the sensitivity to the method of clustering the panel of countries, indicating the importance of methodological considerations in such analyses.

Author(s): Meltem Chadwick and Hulya Saygili

Published Date: November 2024

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