Toward an understanding of household vulnerability in rural Kenya

By L. Christiaensen, K. Subbarao. 2004

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Considerations of risk and vulnerability are key to understanding the dynamics of poverty. This study conceives vulnerability as expected poverty and illustrates a methodology to empirically assess household vulnerability using pseudo panel data derived from repeated cross sections augmented with historical information on shocks. Application of the methodology to data from rural Kenya shows that in 1994 rural households faced on average a 40 percent chance of becoming poor in the future. Households in arid areas that experience large rainfall volatility appear more vulnerable than those in non-arid areas, where malaria emerges as a key risk factor. Idiosyncratic shocks also cause non-negligible consumption volatility. Possession of cattle and sheep/goats appears ineffective in protecting consumption against covariant shocks, though sheep/goat help reduce the effect of idiosyncratic shocks, especially in arid zones. Of the policy instruments simulated, interventions directed at reducing the incidence of malaria, promoting adult literacy, and improving market accessibility hold most promise to reduce vulnerability.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a7281ccd19b41722465204653b0cd54828c8d3f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Safety Research

1. Ruth Vargas Hill
2. Catherine Porter
3. L. Christiaensen
4. Stefan Dercon
5. P. Kristjanson
6. M. Radeny
7. A. Krishna
8. C. Ringler

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Ruth Vargas Hill
2. L. Christiaensen
3. Catherine Porter
4. A. Krishna
5. Stefan Dercon
6. P. Kristjanson
7. M. Radeny
8. Cesar Calvo

In Soil Science

1. Ruth Vargas Hill
2. Catherine Porter
3. A. Krishna
4. Salvatore Di Falco
5. C. Ringler
6. L. Christiaensen
7. Stefan Dercon
8. P. Kristjanson

Citations in the corpus

• Assessing household vulnerability to climate change: The case of farmers in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia (2009, background): “In the expected poverty framework, an individual's vulnerability is the prospect of that person becoming poor in the future if currently not poor, or the prospect of him/her continuing to be poor if currently poor (Christiaensen and Subbarao 2004).”
• Measuring Ethiopian farmers' vulnerability to climate change across regional states: (2008, background): “In the expected poverty framework, vulnerability of a person is conceived as the prospect of that person becoming poor in the future if currently not poor or the prospect of that person continuing to be poor if currently poor (Christiaensen and Subbarao, 2004).”
• Are Fishers Poor or Vulnerable? Assessing Economic Vulnerability in Small-Scale Fishing Communities (2009, background): “, 1997; Jalan and Ravaillon, 1998; Yaqub, 2000) and how these relate to the concept of economic vulnerability (Morduch, 1994; Moser, 1998; Devereux, 2001; Christiaensen and Subbarao, 2004).”
• Chronic and Transient Poverty: Measurement and Estimation, with Evidence from China (2010, background): “Using instead the average of incomes censored at the poverty line would basically assume that individuals are able to smooth their consumption behavior when incomes are no greater than z, but that they are not able to save any of the excess incomes that would bring (e.g., temporarily large or windfa”
• Measuring Individual Vulnerability (2005, background): “There is a small, largely empirical but closely related literature that has introduced concepts of vulnerability (e.g. Bourguignon et al., 2004; Christiaensen and Subbarao, 2004; Chaudhuri et al., 2002; Kamanou and Morduch, 2004).”
• Consumption risk, technology adoption and poverty traps (2007, background): “In a linear specification, this could be written as: 15 Datt and Hoogeveen (2003) and Christiaensen and Subbarao (2005) provide empirical evidence of the differential ability of households to smooth consumption in the face of shocks in the Philippines and Kenya respectively.”
• Understanding poverty dynamics in Kenya (2010, background): “…economics and development studies, has examined aspects of household and individual poverty dynamics (Attwood, 1979; Bane and Ellwood, 1986; Barrett et al., 2001; Bird and Shinkeya, 2003; Lawson et al., 2003; Christiaensen and Subbarao, 2005; Davis, 2006; Moser and Felton, 2007; Quisumbing, 2007).”
• Vulnerability: A Micro Perspective (2006, background): “Christiaensen and Subbarao (2004), Suryahadi and Sumarto (2003), Kamanou and Morduch (2004), and Chaudhuri, et al. (2002) are recent examples.”
• Vulnerability to drought and food price shocks : evidence from Ethiopia (2016, background): “Later work modeled the variance of consumption as depending on household and community characteristics (Christiaensen and Subbarao, 2005), but did not adequately allow for the variance in consumption that results from covariate shocks such as weather or prices.”