The impact of extreme climate events and agricultural diversification in the British West Indies, 1850–1960
研究了1850-1960年间干旱和飓风对英属加勒比地区主要农业出口的影响，发现多样化反而加剧了极端事件中的收入损失，挑战了多样化降低风险的普遍观点。
This paper examines the impact of droughts and hurricanes on key agricultural exports in the British Caribbean between 1850 and 1960, and investigates how diversification shaped economic outcomes. Using export data gathered from Colonial Blue Books, along with proxies for drought and hurricane exposure, the analysis shows that extreme climate events affected crops unevenly: while cocoa, cotton, coffee, coconuts and bananas experienced major declines, sugar proved relatively resilient. Counterfactual estimations reveal that diversification often worsened revenue losses during extreme events, especially in colonies that shifted away from sugar toward less climate-resilient crops. These findings challenge the widely held assumption that diversification inherently reduces risk, showing that it may, in certain contexts, increase economic vulnerability to climate shocks.