Analysis of economic incentives for managing risk at the farm level in the context of climate change

Abstract

Weather indexed crop insurance has the potential of offering risk management to high-risk populations in poor areas, by lowering transaction costs of managing contracts and payouts, thereby offering affordable insurance even to poor farmers. Lower transaction costs relative to multiperil yield-based insurance, can be achieved through use of local weather data, rather than on-farm crop cutting experiments, that lowers verification costs, while maintaining, or even lowering basic risk.