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Abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that rainfall variability represents a significant source of
agriculture production risk. Surprisingly, there have been very few economic analyses
exploring the link between rainfall variability and agriculture production. This paper is
intended to investigate the factual basis of this assumption and to inform future government
policy in such areas as drought, climate change adaptation and water policy. We investigate
whether rainfall variability has had an actual impact on agricultural production, specifically
dryland cropping in Victorian regions during the period 1982-83 to 2004-05.