Transfers, diversification and household risk strategies : experimental evidence with lessons for climate change adaptation

By K. Macours, Patrick Premand, Renos Vakis. 2012

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While climate change is likely to increase weather risks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies to facilitate adaptation. This paper presents experimental evidence on a program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving households' risk-management through income diversification. The intervention targeted agricultural households exposed to weather shocks related to changes in rainfall and temperature patterns. It combined a conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant. The authors identify the relative impact of each complementary package based on randomized assignment, and analyze how impacts vary by exposure to exogenous drought shocks. The results show that both complementary interventions provide full protection against drought shocks two years after the end of the intervention. Households that received the productive investment grant also had higher average consumption levels. The complementary interventions led to diversification of economic activities and better protection from shocks compared to beneficiaries of the basic conditional cash transfer and control households. These results show that combining safety nets with productive interventions can help households manage future weather risks and promote longer-term program impacts.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ef4086faa5f48283b03ede1d8f283d1507bb889

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurship Programs in Developing Countries: A Meta Regression Analysis (2013, background): “The complexity increases as the training programs combine other financial and advisory support especially for social assistance beneficiaries (Almeida and Galasso, 2009; Carneiro et al., 2009; Macours et al., 2012).”
Generating Skilled Self-Employment in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Uganda* (2014, background): “, 2009) but two Nicaraguan experiments find no effect on earnings and non-farm production (Macours et al., 2012; Maluccio, 2010).”
The Persistent Power of Behavioral Change: Long-Run Impacts of Temporary Savings Subsidies for the Poor (2018, background): “For evidence on small business grants plus training or technical assistance for small business see Macours et al. (2012) and Blattman et al. (2014).”
Learning and Earning: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in India (2017, background): “Macours, Premand, and Vakis (2012) find that in the context of Nicaragua access to vocational training in conjunction with a conditional cash transfer program enable households to insure against weather related shocks.”