Stolen Dreams or Collateral Damage : Climate and Economic Growth in Time of COVID-19

This paper aims to provide an empirical investigation of the climate-growth joint dynamics considering exogenous shocks such as the COVID-19 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with no presumptions imposed on the direction of causality. To quantify climate change, we use temperature and precipitation deviations from their historical trends. We estimate country- specific and panel vector autoregressive models with exogenous variables to supplement existing attempts that integrate climate change in economic mod- elling. Our findings lend evidence to the interrelation between climate change and economic growth without ruling out bi-directional causality, a reality that many climate studies tend to overlook