Research Theme: Risk and Insurance

Everyone is subject to different types of risk, both personal, such as family illness, or community wide, such as drought. Households that might have access to loans are reluctant to take one out for fear of losing their collateral in the case that they are unable to pay. The provision of agricultural finance is very low due to the high risk involved, and it is particularly difficult for smaller producers to get access to loans. If an expansion of access to finance is combined with the provision of insurance and other financial products and services, then the risk of both borrower and lender can be reduced, and participation in financial markets will increase. AMA researchers are looking at both the impact of health insurance products to protect borrowers in the case of illness, as well as the creation of innovative new types of crop insurance to increase the availability of agricultural finance. With a greater ability both to manage risk and engage in new production strategies, farmers can move themselves to a higher income trajectory and improve their long term well being.

Research Projects

• Micro Health Insurance in Rural Cambodia: An evaluation of the impact on the stabilization of incomes and enhancement of agricultural productivity and asset accumulation
• Understanding the impact of idiosyncratic shocks on farm productivity and household asset building and protection in Ethiopia, Ghana and Bangladesh
• Weather Insurance, Price Information and Hedging: Financial Initiatives to Help the Poor Manage Agricultural Risk (India)

Pilot Projects

• Insuring Livestock against Drought-Related Mortality: The Marsabit Pilot
• Area Based Yield Insurance for Peruvian Coastal Agriculture

Publications

• BASIS Brief no. 2008-08
  Altering Poverty Dynamics with Index Insurance: Northern Kenya's HSNP+, by Christopher B. Barrett, Michael R. Carter, Sommarat Chantarat, John McPeak, and Andrew Mude. November 2008. 2 pages. [Adobe Acrobat 47K].

• BASIS Brief no. 2008-07
  Insuring the Never before Insured: Explaining Index Insurance through Financial Education Games, by Michael R. Carter, Christopher B. Barrett, Stephen Boucher, Sommarat Chantarat, Francisco Galarza, John McPeak, Andrew Mude and Carolina Trivelli. October 2008. 8 pages. [Adobe Acrobat 326K].
  
  Spanish version available: Asegurando a los que nunca estuvieron asegurados: Explicando el seguro por índice a través de juegos de educación financiera
  

• BASIS Brief no. 2008-01
  Weather Insurance, Price Information, and Hedging: Helping the Poor Manage Risk, by Shawn Cole, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Stefan Hunt, Jeremy Tobacman, and Petia Topalova. January 2008. 4 pages. [Adobe Acrobat PDF 101K]
  

• BASIS Brief no. 2007-05
  Insuring Health: Testing the Effectiveness of Micro-health Insurance to Promote Economic Wellbeing for the Poor, by David I. Levine, Nhong Hema, and Ian Ramage. July 2007. 4 pages. [Adobe Acrobat PDF 71K]

• BASIS Brief no. 2007-03
  Local Risk Management: Protecting Household Asset Building and Farm Productivity from Idiosyncratic Shocks, by Christopher B. Barrett, Ernest Aryeetey, Agnes Quisumbing, Akhter Ahmed, John Hoddinott, Felix Naschold, Jacqueline Vanderpuye-Orgle and Tassew Woldehanna. July 2007

Links

• Cornell University research on Poverty, Inequality, and Development
• International Livestock Reearch Institute
• Maxwell School of Syracuse University