Coping with shocks: the impact of Self-Help Groups on migration and food security

Timothée Demont

No 2016, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: This paper asks whether local savings and credit associations help poor rural households hit by climatic shocks. Combining data from an original field experiment with meteorological data, I investigate how Self-Help Groups (SHGs) allow households to cope with rainfall shocks in villages of East India over a sevenyear period. I show that SHGs withstand large rainfall shocks remarkably, and that credit flows are very stable in treated villages. As a result, treated households experience a higher food security during the lean season following a drought and increase seasonal migration to mitigate future income shocks. These results imply that small-scale financial institutions like SHGs help to finance temporary risk management strategies and to cope with important covariate income shocks such as droughts.

Keywords: microfinance; weather shocks; risk management; seasonal migration; food security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 O13 O15 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-env, nep-exp, nep-mfd and nep-mig
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Working Paper: Coping with shocks: the impact of Self-Help Groups on migration and food security (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aim:wpaimx:2016

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