Coping or Hoping ? Livelihood Diversification and Food Insecurity in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ann M. Furbush, Anna Josephson, Talip Kilic and Jeffrey D. Michler

No 11014, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of livelihood diversification on food insecurity amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis uses household panel data from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria in which the first round was collected immediately prior to the pandemic and extends through multiple rounds of monthly data collection during the pandemic. Using this pre- and post-outbreak data, and guided by a pre-analysis plan, the paper estimates the causal effect of livelihood diversification on food insecurity. The results do not support the hypothesis that livelihood diversification boosts household resilience. Although income diversification may serve as an effective coping mechanism for small-scale shocks, the findings show that for a disaster on the scale of the pandemic, this strategy is not effective. Policy makers looking to prepare for the increased occurrence of large-scale disasters will need to grapple with the fact that coping strategies that gave people hope in the past may fail them as they try to cope with the future.

Date: 2025-01-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/0998301 ... b9e-2cfbee039761.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:wbk:wbrwps:11014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().