As per the latest studies, hotter years are linked with reduced economic output in the developing countries. And one of the reasons for the same is less productivity at work.
Manufacturing Sector Gets Hit By The Hotter Days
As per the study, the effects are mainly felt in the Manufacturing sector with the new sets of high-frequency microdata maintained a worker output. And the national representative data set records over 58,000 factories in India. Researchers found that the plants produce about 2% less revenue for each degree that rises in the annual temperature.
The greatest declines have occurred in labor-intensive plants.
Anant Sudarshan, the South Asia Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago said that the effect of high temperatures has already been known to the lower crop yields. The paper further shows that the rising temperature also hurts the economic output in the other sectors. This in turn affects the productivity of human labour. And the damage is the highest when warm days get warmer.
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Sudarshan has co-authored the study with E. Somanathan of the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, along with Rohini Somanatha of Delhi School of Economics and Meenu Tewari from the University of North Carolina in the US.
The authors argue that even though the focus of the paper is on the Indian manufacturing plants but of the universal physiological mechanism. But the implications are for every sector where manual labour is required.
Climate Change Declines Productivity Not Absenteeism
The study further said that even though climate change declines productivity in the workplace, it does not encourage absenteeism. This could possibly because the people are exposed to high temperatures both at home and outside.
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Somanathan said that the very fact that there is an absence of climate control, the productivity of the workers get affected on hot days. He also said that in the future, there might be a solution towards the rising temperature and shifting the labour-intensive sectors to some other areas of the world.
