Elfatih Eltahir holds an endowed chair at MIT in Civil Engineering. His new paper has been written up in Time Magazine. Here is his Google citation page. Here is a quote from the Time piece;
"The effects of unchecked temperature rise would extend beyond the health concerns associated with being outside in high temperatures. With workers unable to stay outdoors for extended periods of time, the region's economy and agricultural output would decline, experts say. “With the disruption to the agricultural production, it doesn’t need to be the heat wave itself that kills people," says study author Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a press release. "Production will go down, so potentially everyone will suffer.”"
What does an economics have to say about this prediction of economic outcomes out 83 years from now?
"Deadly heat waves projected in the densely populatedagricultural regions of South Asia"
1. Note that there are no general equilibrium effects. If the South Asian economy (i.e India) is closed to international trade, then agriculture prices will go up as production contracts, farmers could actually be richer if demand is inelastic.
2. There is no storage and no savings in his "economy". If heat waves are predictable, won't people save $ for the hot summers? This paper by Donaldson et. al. shows that capital markets in India's rural areas play a key role in allowing for consumption risk smoothing. This MIT engineer is colleagues with Rob Townsend and should talk to Rob about his 1994 Econometrica.
3. There is no urban air conditioned sector for people to migrate to.
4. If the South Asian economy is open to international trade, then urban consumers will import from other regions during hot summers and won't enjoy farming output price increases. In this case, local farmers will bear the incidence of hot summers. To reduce their exposure to such income risk, they should send a child to the city to work and the child will remit $ back to the country side. Read Mobarak's co-authored Econometrica from Bangladesh for an optimistic preview of the region's future.
5. There is no innovation in the agricultural sector to allow the South Asian farmers to cope with extreme heat. Neither human capital increases, nor world innovations diffusing to South Asia plays a role in helping these individuals to cope.
6. I could not find a discussion of farmer choice of what to grow and the discrete choice margin of adjustment to more heat resistant crops (see Mendelsohn's many papers).
A quick look at the 47 references of the paper reveals that no economics research is cited. That's interesting on several levels.