The impact of climate change on Turkish agriculture: An analysis of crop yields and acreage decisions

This study construes the impact of climate change on crop (barley, corn, sunflower, wheat) acreage and yield by focusing on the Turkish districts between the period 2009-2017. After detecting spatial autocorrelation among districts with local Moran's I test, this study establishes implications of spatial autoregressive with spatially autocorrelated errors model (SARAR). Estimation results reveal that except for barley acreage model, overheating and over-precipitation are not harmful. In this context, the climate impact on crop production is moderate. Moreover, the study controls input and output prices. Empirical findings illustrate that even if price vector is not statistically significant for every crop model, when the analysis excludes the price vector, the effect of climate vector is overestimated. Results of this study indicate that climate variables have direct but limited effect on crop acreage and yield and that there are several reasons such as production decisions, agricultural policy and producers household characteristics which influence agricultural production.