Browsing by Subject "Indexbased microinsurance"

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    Aspects of demand-side oriented insurance of volatile food prices in developing and emerging countries
    (2018) Hochscherf, Julian; Schiller, Jörg
    The dissertation is concerned with the relation between formal and informal risk management in developing and emerging countries in the context of rainfall and food price variability. The dissertation contains three research projects. In order to systematize the literature on welfare effects of food price volatility and rainfall risks and the related coping strategies, a systematic review on the quantification of these two risk types has been performed. Many studies in the recent past have been published to quantify poverty effects of materialized risk such as drought events or the consequence of the 2008-09 food price crises in emerging and least developed countries. As agrarian economies in least developed countries heavily depend on the correct onset and amount of rainfall quantities, rainfall failures are likely to have adverse consequences for household income and its volatility. In addition, agrarian households in least developed countries are mostly net food consumers and thus highly dependent on the realization of food prices. The review systematizes the empirical evidence on adverse income effects of drought events and food price increases as well as it summarizes the risk management and coping strategies directly linked to these two shock types. A particular emphasis will be given to the stabilizing power of labor markets and adaptation through consumption responses. The second paper is concerned with informal risk management strategies taken out by agricultural households, in particular with the instrument of labor time allocation. Subsistence farmers in low income countries are confronted with multiple risks. In reaction to them, farm households have developed strategies to cope with yield risks to self-insure against these income shocks. Recent developments in global food markets have increased food price volatility, which, in particular, puts low-income households at risk. When small-scale farmers allocate their labor time over different income generating activities, they face the risk of uncertain purchasing power of income in the presence of food price variability. Thus, the paper analyzes the labor time allocation decision between self-employment and wage labor, taking into account the uncertain purchasing power of wages resulting from food price volatility and the farm production risk induced by rainfall variability. Using a panel structured household data set containing consumer-producer households in rural India, the labor time allocation decision between farming and labor market participation will be analyzed and the effect of production and food price uncertainty on labor time allocation will be estimated. The analysis reveals counterintuitive time allocation effects of risk. The third project is concerned with formal insurance demand by farm households and the interrelatedness between formal and informal risk provision. For this purpose, a data set for a weather index insurance demand product has been analyzed. Index based microinsurance as a tool to insure the income of agriculturally active households has triggered extensive discussions in the literature. Despite the convincing theoretical argumentation, the demand for these products stays behind expectations. Several studies revealed effects impacting the demand for index insurance, such as liquidity constraints, basis risk, lack of understanding and trust in insurers and products alike. This paper takes a different perspective and hypothesizes that low demand is due to heterogeneous risk exposure towards weather variability among potential insured resulting from informal risk management. The paper tests the impact of income heterogeneity as a measure of risk exposure on insurance demand and finds that risk exposure negatively affects insurance demand. In order to increase demand, it is concluded that product design should emphasize more the importance of income risk composition and exposure of potentially insured. The dissertation concludes with a critical discussion of how to reconcile formal and informal risk management practices and gives policy implications of how to innovate existing formal insurance products to increase demand.