Journal Special Issue
Vulnerability in Development
The six papers in this Special Issue to provide insights into advances in conceptualizing and measuring vulnerability, in particularly household vulnerability to poverty and country and regional vulnerability to external shocks. All of the papers...
Working Paper
Inequality and Risk
In poor societies, asset accumulation serves as insurance. It also opens the door to wider inequality. Many societies prohibit certain types of accumulation, such as land sales or indenture contracts. This paper investigates the theoretical...
Working Paper
Targeting and Informal Insurance
The standard method of testing for efficient risk-sharing in village economies does not allow one to identify vulnerable households, only to make statements about the average risk in the village, or of sub-groups identifiable on the basis of...
Working Paper
Assessing Vulnerability Before, During and After a Natural Disaster in Fragile Regions
Current approaches of measuring vulnerability to natural hazards generally use a rather static perspective that focuses on a single point in time—often before a hazardous event occurs. In contrast, the paper argues that vulnerability assessment...
Working Paper
Livelihood Risk from HIV in Semi-Arid Tropics of Rural Andhra Pradesh
This paper discusses the livelihood dynamics in the fragile landscape of the semi arid tropics (SAT) of Andhra Pradesh. SAT is home to the poorest of the poor who live in conditions of persistent drought, subsistence agriculture and poor access to...
Working Paper
Food Aid and Informal Insurance
Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid...
Journal Article
Risk sharing and public transfers
We use public transfers in the form of food aid to test for the presence of risk sharing arrangements at the village level in rural Ethiopia. We reject perfect risk-sharing, but find evidence of partial risk-sharing via transfers. There is also...
Journal Article
Measuring Vulnerability
Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with...
Book
Insurance Against Poverty
Poor people in developing countries are often affected by droughts, floods, illness, crop failure, job loss, and economic downturns. Much of their energy goes into coping with these shocks and into day-to-day survival. While insurance and credit...
Working Paper
The impact of a higher leverage ratio on the South African economy
We employ a micro-founded and stock-and-flow-consistent model to study the impact of a higher leverage ratio on the South African economy. The model provides a rich representation of institutional balance sheets. The relationship between bank capital...
Working Paper
Migration Taxes and Human Capital Formation
Use of migration tax as an instrument for financing development expenditure in poorer countries has received renewed attention recently and is evolving as an important subject of research in development economics. This paper discusses a related issue...
Working Paper
The New Basel Capital Accord and Developing Countries
This paper argues that, if implemented in its current form, the new Basel Capital Accord will adversely effect developing sovereigns, corporates and banks wishing to borrow in international markets. This impact will result from the major banks’...
Working Paper
Consumption Smoothing Across Space
Panel data from villages in rural south India have been used for leading econometric studies on risk-sharing in village economies. The work has influenced debate on safety net design world-wide and has driven scholarly agendas on household economics...
Working Paper
Tomorrow's Hunger
Whilst traditional food security analysis offers an ex post view on who the food insecure are and why they are so, looking at food insecurity from a vulnerability perspective provides a dynamic and forward looking way of analysing causes and more...