On The Distributional Implications of Climate Change: A Methodological Framework and Application to Rural India Hanan Jacoby ∗ Mariano Rabassa Emmanuel Skoufias The World Bank PRELIMINARY DRAFT This version: August 2009 Abstract Climate change will severely depress productivity in developing country agricul- ture, a sector upon which much of the worlds poor depend. Though a large literature attempts to quantify the economic costs to agriculture as a whole, there has been lit- tle, if any, effort to understand how these potential losses will be distributed across households and how the poor will fare in particular. In this paper, we present a method- ological framework for tracing out the consequences of climate change for poverty and income distribution in the rural economy. We propose a two step approach, first esti- mating the impact of climate on the returns to land and labor, and then constructing, from these returns and household baseline characteristics, a counter-factual measure of household income (consumption) under alternative climate change scenarios. ∗ Contact Information: Jacoby hjacoby@worldbank.org; Skoufias eskoufias@worldbank.org