The Protective Role of Index Insurance in the Experience of Violent Conflict: Evidence from Ethiopia

Tekalign Sakketa, Dan Maggio and John McPeak
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Dan Maggio: Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University
John McPeak: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

No 385, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Droughts are among the leading causes of livestock mortality and conflict among pastoralist populations in east africa. To foster climate resiliency in these populations, index based livestock insurance (ibli) products have become popular. These products, which allow herders to hedge climate risk, often utilize remote-sensed data to trigger indemnity payouts, thus ameliorating moral hazard issues associated with standard insurance products. We study how one such program, implemented in the southern ethiopia, impacted the experience of violent conflict among participating households. Using causal mediation analysis, we show first that there is a strong link between rangeland conditions and violent conflict; a one-unit decrease in the standardized normalized difference vegetation index (zndvi) in the previous season is associated with a 0.3-1.7 percentage point increase in the likelihood of conflict exposure. Within the mediation framework, we leverage a randomized encouragement experiment and show that insurance uptake reduces the conflict risk created by poor rangeland conditions by between 17 and 50 percent. Our results suggest that social protection programs, particularly index insurance programs, may act as a protective factor in areas with complex risk profiles, where households are exposed to both climatic and conflict risks, which themselves may interact.

Keywords: pastoralism; conflict; weather; index insurance; causal mediation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 G52 O13 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-des, nep-dev and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:385

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