Are the poor less well-insured? Evidence on vulnerability to income risk in rural China

Jyotsna Jalan and Martin Ravallion

No 1863, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the hypothesis of perfect insurance is universally rejected. Those in the poorest wealth decile are the least well-insured, with 40 percent of an income shock being passed on to current consumption. By contrast, consumption by the richest third ofhouseholds is protected from almost 90 percent of an income shock. The extent of insurance in a given wealth stratum varies little between poor and nonpoor areas.

Keywords: Environmental Economics&Policies; Services&Transfers to Poor; Health Economics&Finance; Fiscal&Monetary Policy; Payment Systems&Infrastructure; Environmental Economics&Policies; Economic Theory&Research; Inequality; Health Economics&Finance; Safety Nets and Transfers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-12-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... d/PDF/multi_page.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are the poor less well insured? Evidence on vulnerability to income risk in rural China (1999)
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:1863

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 ().