Ranking the Impact of Climate Variability on UK Retail Sectors: A Path to Resilience
40 Pages Posted: 19 Oct 2015 Last revised: 24 Oct 2015
Date Written: October 19, 2015
Abstract
Every day, people make economic decisions based on the weather. Indeed, the seasonal cycles of weather purchases are well-documented and accounted for by supply chain managers and sales executives.
Likewise, the effect of weather variability from expected seasonal weather on the sales, inventories, supply chains and operating costs of companies is significant. Although there is a growing literature on weather and economics, there are very few scientific contributions that formally link the effects of unseasonal weather on retail sales. For the UK retail sales market in particular, there is only one research study, limited to one anomalours (or severe) weather event in the UK twenty years ago (the heatwave of summer 1995).
In this paper, our objective is to statistically analyze how climate variability affects UK retail sales, to rank UK retail categories as a function of their sensitivity to weather risk, and to model the impact of climate variability to understand the level of resilience of UK retail sales to climate variability.
Keywords: Climate Variability, UK retail sector, Ranking
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