Growing Apart: Declining Within- and Across-Locality Insurance in Rural China

Yu Zheng, Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir and Corina Mommaerts

No 16654, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We consider risk sharing in rural China during rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related to observable economic changes: the shift from agriculture to wage employment, the decline of publicly owned Township-and-Village Enterprises, and increased migrant work. Further evidence suggests that as these changes took place at the village level, higher levels of government failed to offset these effects through the tax-and-transfer system, leaving households more exposed to both idiosyncratic and village-aggregate shocks.

Keywords: Consumption insurance; Risk-sharing; Rural china (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 E21 H71 O11 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16654 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Growing apart: Declining within- and across-locality insurance in rural China (2025)
Working Paper: Growing Apart: Declining Within- and Across-Locality Insurance in Rural China (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16654

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16654

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().