Abstract
A large literature has estimated the effects of climate change on agricultural yields. That work assumes, but rarely tests, that changes in yields translate directly into changes in household wellbeing. Such assumptions elide the rather large literature on resilience to climate and other shocks. This work uses satellite derived yield data (GCVI) to analyze the relationship between agricultural productivity and household welfare, as measured by overall and food expenditure in the West African Sahel. We use remotely-sensed vegetation indices as a proxy for crop yields, as well as a granular household level dataset from 85\% of Mali's administrative communes between 2011 and 2019. Calculating commune-level indices for each growing season, we are then able to estimate their effects on household level expenditures for two growing seasons per household. As expected, we find that changes in yields have a statistically significant effect on overall household expenditure as well as other expenditure categories (food, leisure, etc.) for rural dwellers. This effect for rural dwellers is, however, relatively muted to changes in the values of vegetation indices, with GCVI to expenditure elasticities in the range of 0.10. Such low expenditure elasticities for changes in yields indicates a large degree of resilience to climate-related variation in agricultural productivity by Malian rural households. We draw conclusions based on this work for policy makers and for researchers interested in using remote sensed data for climate change and resilience research.