Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology

Abstract

Does Flood Disaster Lessen GDP Growth? Evidence from the Gambia’s Manufacturing and Agricultural Sectors

Ebrima K. Ceesay

Natural disaster such as floods has experienced extraordinary costs to animals, human, social and economic
features, affecting not only the local but worldwide economy. Though the frequency of flood, time it takes for
flood to last, the cause of floods, affected areas and economic damages are happening in the raining season in the
Gambia. This paper studies the impacts of flood disaster on GDP growth, in the agricultural and manufacturing
sectors in the Gambia for the period of 1969 to 2016 by applying the Autoregressive Distributed lags models with
Dynamac (dynardl) for co-integration and error correction model (ECM) for short-run and long run relationship
between the variables. Error correction (EC) specified in the model so as the dependent variable to be run in
differences. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test, Phillips-Perron (PP) test and Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-
Shin (KPSS) test inspects the stationarity of the variables in the level and first differences. Since the CUSUM test
does not cross the upper and lower 5% line, the model is structurally stable. The findings of the study suggest that
floods affect positively the agricultural growth in both the long run and short run. Floods also affects positively the
growth of GDP in the short and long run while floods affect negatively the growth of manufacturing sector in the
long and short run. The following variables negatively affect the growth of agriculture in the Gambia in the long
run; frequency of floods, growth of GDP, growth of manufacturing sector, growth of inflation. The results of the
study have important implications on growth of GDP, growth of agricultural sector and growth of manufacturing
sectors.

Published Date: 2020-04-26; Received Date: 2020-04-12