Risk-sharing networks and insurance against illness
نویسندگان
چکیده
Most risk-sharing tests on developing country data are conducted at the level of the village; generally, the full risk-sharing hypothesis is rejected. This paper uses detailed data on all insurance networks within a village in Tanzania; networks are not clustered but largely overlapping. We test whether full risk-sharing occurs within these networks. While village level full-insurance cannot be rejected for food consumption, we find evidence consistent with at least partial insurance of non-food consumption via networks. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: O12; O15; D12
منابع مشابه
A Novel Analysis of Risk Sharing Effects on Income Inequality in Informal Insurances
T his study aims to demonstrate that joining in risk sharing network leads to the reduction in incomes volatility. In this respect, income variance for a group of members in an informal insurance is modelled in which income variance prior to joining risk sharing network and after joining is analyzed statistically. A Monte Carlo simulation technique is used to prove the result. To extend an...
متن کاملSelling Formal Insurance to the Informally Insured
Farmers face enormous production risks due to unpredictable rainfall, yet most do not have any formal insurance. One explanation for this is the existence of informal network-based risk sharing. Using a randomized controlled experiment, we study the demand for, and effects of, offering formal index-based rainfall insurance in an environment of tightly knit informal risk sharing networks: sub-ca...
متن کاملInformal Risk Sharing, Index Insurance, and Risk Taking in Developing Countries
This paper presents preliminary findings from a research project that examines the interaction between informal risk sharing, index insurance and risk-taking. We have randomized rainfall insurance contracts offered to cultivating and landless households in a set of Indian villages where pre-existing census data on caste networks allows us to characterize the nature and extent of informal risk s...
متن کاملSocial Capital and Weather Shocks in Ethiopia: Climate Change and Culturally-Induced Poverty Traps
One implication of climate change is that farmers in the horn of Africa will be more frequently exposed to droughts and floods. While adoption of certain farm management strategies reduces exposure to such shocks, the uptake of risk mitigating measures is far from complete. We explore how social capital in the form of kinship networks, characterized by the moral imperative of within-group shari...
متن کاملEffectiveness of community health financing in meeting the cost of illness.
How to finance and provide health care for the more than 1.3 billion rural poor and informal sector workers in low- and middle-income countries is one of the greatest challenges facing the international development community. This article presents the main findings from an extensive survey of the literature of community financing arrangements, and selected experiences from the Asia and Africa r...
متن کامل