Abstract:
Climate change tends to have negative effects on crop yield through its influence on crop production.
Understanding the relationship between climatic variables and crop area on the mean and variance of
crop yield will facilitate development of appropriate policies to cope with climate change. This paper
examines the effects of climatic variables and crop area on the mean and variance of maize yield in
Ghana. The Just and Pope stochastic production function using the Cobb-Douglas functional form
was employed. The results show that average maize yield is positively related to crop area and negatively related to rainfall and temperature. Furthermore, increase in crop area and temperature will
enlarge maize yield variability while rainfall increase will decrease the variability in maize yield
