Compilation, conference papers, research reports on crop insurance for agricultural development in developed countries and developing countries - considers farmers' and banks' demand as well as state aid for agricultural insurance; discusses practical experiences in Brazil, Japan and the USA. Bibliography, graphs, statistical tables.
Governments in developing countries have been increasingly involved in the support of agricultural (crop and livestock) insurance programs in recent years. In their attempts to design and implement agricultural insurance, they have sought technical and financial assistance from the international community and particularly from the World Bank. One of the recurrent requests from governments regards international experience with agricultural insurance, not only in developed countries, where in some cases agricultural insurance has been offered for more than a century, but also in middleand low-income countries. Governments are particularly interested in the technical, operational, financial, and institutional aspects of public support to agricultural insurance. 'Government Support to Agricultural Insurance' informs public and private decision makers involved in agricultural insurance about recent developments, with a particular focus on middle- and low-income countries. It presents an updated picture of the spectrum of institutional frameworks and experiences with agricultural insurance, ranging from countries in which the public sector provides no support to those in which governments heavily subsidize agricultural insurance. This analysis is based on a survey conducted by the World Bank s agricultural insurance team in 2008 in 65 developed and developing countries. Drawing on the survey results, the book identifies some key roles governments can play to support the development of sustainable, affordable, and cost-effective agricultural insurance programs.
This comprehensive overview of local food systems explores alternative definitions of local food, estimates market size and reach, describes the characteristics of local consumers and producers, and examines early indications of the economic and health impacts of local food systems. Defining ¿local¿ based on marketing arrangements, such as farmers selling directly to consumers at regional farmers¿ markets or to schools, is well recognized. Statistics suggest that local food markets account for a small, but growing, share of U.S. agricultural production. For smaller farms, direct marketing to consumers accounts for a higher percentage of their sales than for larger farms. Charts and tables.
This book examines the implications of risk management for policy in agriculture. Opening with a chapter on risk management principles and guidelines for policy design in agriculture, the book goes on to look at quantitative analysis of risk and then at policy in various countries.
It is only just recently that people have the tools to judge how well they are doing when making decisions. These tools were conceptualized in the seventeenth century. Since then many people have worked to sharpen the concepts, and to explore how these can be applied further. The problems of decision-making and the theory developed correspondingly have drawn the interest of mathematicians, psychologists, statisticians, economists, philosophers, organizational experts, sociologists, not only for their general relevance, but also for a more intrinsic fascination. There are quite a few institutionalized activities to disseminate results and stimulate research in decision-making. For about a decade now a European organizational structure, centered mainly around the psy chological interest in decision-making. There have been conferences in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Uxbridge, Rome and Darmstadt. Conference papers have been partly published+. The organization has thus stabilized, and its re latively long history makes it interesting to see what kind of developments occurred, within the area of interest.
Disasters damage and destroy infrastructure and disrupt economic activities and services, potentially delaying long-term development and hampering efforts to reduce poverty in the region. Countries require a strong enabling environment for disaster risk financing to ensure the timely availability of post-disaster funding. This report presents a comprehensive diagnostics tool kit that countries can apply to assess the financial management of disaster risk. The framework examines the state of the enabling environment and provides a basis to enhance financial resilience with insurance and other risk transfer instruments. It incorporates lessons from the country diagnostics assessments for Fiji, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka that made use of the tool kit and methodology.
If risk aversion and willingness to take on risk are driven by emotions and we as humans are bad at correctly identifying them, the finance profession has a serious challenge at hand—how to reliably identify the individual risk profile of a retail investor or high-net-worth individual. In this series of CFA Institute Research Foundation briefs, we have asked academics and practitioners to summarize the current state of knowledge about risk profiling in different key areas.
Considerable evidence suggests that many people for whom insurance is worth purchasing do not have coverage and others who appear not to need financial protection against certain events actually have purchased coverage. There are certain types of events for which one might expect to see insurance widely marketed are now viewed today by insurers as uninsurable and there are other policies one might not expect to be successfully marketed that exist on a relatively large scale. In addition, evidence suggests that cost-effective preventive measures are sometimes rewarded by insurers in ways that could change their clients' behavior. These examples reveal that insurance purchasing and marketing activities do not always produce results that are in the best interest of individuals at risk. Insurance Decision Making and Market Behavior discusses such behavior with the intent of categorizing these insurance "anomalies". It represents a first step in constructing a theory of insurance decision making to explain behavior that does not conform to standard economic models of choice and decision-making. Finally, the authors propose a set of prescriptive solutions for improving insurance decision-making.
This publication presents recent OECD papers on risk and regulatory policy. They offer measures for developing, or improving, coherent risk governance policies.
