Climate Resilience Pathways of Rural Households. Evidence from Ethiopia

Solomon Asfaw (), Giuseppe Maggio and Alessandro Palma
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Solomon Asfaw: Green Climate Fund (GCF), South Korea

SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School

Abstract: This paper explores the resilience capacity of rural Ethiopian households after the drought shock occurred in 2011. The work develops an original empirical framework able to capture the policy and socio-economic determinants of households’ resilience capacity by making parametric statistical assumption on the resilience distribution. To this end, the analysis employs a two-wave representative panel dataset aligned with detailed weather records while controlling for a large set of household- and community-level characteristics. The analysis shows that the majority of these factors affects significantly resilience capacity only in the group of households affected by the drought shock, suggesting that the observed effect relates to the adaptive capacity enabled by these factors, rather than a simple welfare effect. Three policy indications emerge from the findings of the empirical model. First, government support programmes, such as the PSNP, appear to sustain households’ resilience by helping them to reach the level of pre-shock total consumption, but have no impact on the food-consumption resilience. Secondly, the “selling out assets strategy” affects positively on households’ resilience, but only in terms of food consumption. Finally, the presence of informal institutions, such as social networks providing financial support, sharply increases households’ resilience by helping them to reach pre-shock levels of food and total consumption. Policies incentivizing the formation of these networks, through the participation of households to agricultural cooperative, agricultural associations, or community projects, may also help farmers in recovering their wealth level after a weather shock.

Keywords: resilience; adaptation; livelihood strategy; food security; climate change; Ethiopia; drought. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 I32 Q12 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cdm, nep-dev and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Climate resilience pathways of rural households: evidence from Ethiopia (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sru:ssewps:2018-18

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