Citation
Fawad, Entezari Ahmad
(2020)
Impact of climate change and macroeconomic factors on Malaysian agriculture production.
Masters thesis, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Abstract
Agriculture sector is one of the important sectors that contributed 8.6% of the
national Gross Domestic Product and about 12.1% of the total labour force in
2016. In general, the production system in agriculture sector is totally different
from other economic sectors such as manufacturing and services. This is because
agricultural production is not just based on labour and capital, but it is also highly
related to the climate variables i.e., rainfall, temperature. Therefore, the agriculture
sector, especially crop production is affected biophysically by climatic variables
such as temperature and rainfall. Past studies have indeed proven and
demonstrated the negative effect of climate change on agricultural production. This
indicates that climate change reduces agricultural production and consequently,
endangering food security. In Malaysia, temperature has increasing trend and
rainfall showed acute fluctuations. Prolong raised temperature and rainfall
fluctuations cause climate disasters such as flood and drought which lead to
declining in agricultural production. In addition to this, the agriculture production
is also constrained by the economic factors. For instance, the agriculture
employment in Malaysia recorded substantial declines in the years of 1982, 1997,
2001, 2011 and 2016, corresponding with the decline in agriculture gross domestic
product growth. However, the effect of climate variables is not considered in the
agricultural production function in majority of the past studies. Thus, this study
included the climate variables (rainfall and temperature) in to the production
function with macroeconomic factors to examine the impact of climate change and
macroeconomic factors on the Malaysia’s agricultural production. This study
employed the cointegration method and utilized annual data spanning a period of
37 years (1980 - 2016) including agriculture real gross domestic product as
dependent variable, proxy for agriculture production, while explanatory variables
are interest rate, number of employees in agriculture, real gross domestic product
per capita as economic factors and rainfall and temperature as climate factors. This
study employed cointegration method using Ordinary Least Square technique to estimate the long run and short run effects with Engle-Granger cointegration test
and Error Correction Model, respectively. The cointegration test showed that there
is a long-run cointegration between agriculture production and all explanatory
variables. In the long run, interest rate, rainfall and temperature have negative and
significant effects on agriculture production, while national income and
employment have positive significant effects. In the short run, rainfall and
temperature have negative and significant effects on agricultural production while
employment has a positive and significant effect. Meanwhile, interest rate and
income do not have significant effects on agriculture production in the short run.
Therefore, the findings of the study highlighted that perfect information sharing of
an accurate forecast on weather change, such as rainfall and temperature, is
important to reduce the farmers’ losses. Based on accurate weather forecast from
meteorology department, farmers can make a good plan on how to manage their
agricultural production. In the economic perspective, the policy maker can
establish special interest loan facilities to encourage farmers increase their
investment on their agricultural production and adopt advance technology.
Additionally, the authorities should make sure that there is no labour shortage in
this sector. Because this is an upstream sector for food production, labour shortage
in this sector may cause food shortage. This points to the possible implications of
labour shortage in challenging the national food security issue.
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