Vulnerability to Poverty Following Extreme Weather Events in Malawi

Sandra Baquie and Habtamu Neda Fuje

No 9435, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Severe weather shocks recurrently hit Malawi, and they adversely affect the incomes of many farmhouseholds as well as small businesses. With climate change, the frequency of extreme weather events is expected toincrease further. A clear understanding of households’ vulnerability to shock-induced poverty is critical fordisaster risk management and the design of scalable social safety net programs. Standard poverty measures rely onstatic snapshots that are suitable for quantifying structural poverty but not for assessing the vulnerabilityof non-poor households to fall below the poverty line when they experience shocks. This study uses a nationallyrepresentative household survey and exogenously measured weather shocks to assess households' vulnerability topoverty in Malawi. To accurately estimate the impacts of shocks on consumption and vulnerability, the study excludesany kind of assistance (aid and food or cash transfers) that households might have received after major disasters. Thekey findings of the study are as follows: (1) drought during the growing season decreases non-assistance consumption percapita by 5–12 percent, depending on its intensity; (2) excess rainfall at the onset of the growing season reducesfood consumption by 1.8 percent, while excess rainfall later in the growing season appears to increase consumption; (3)vulnerability to poverty is generally higher than static poverty, especially compared to static poverty measuredduring a good weather year; and (4) in years of extreme droughts, such as 2016, recorded poverty rates are higherthan vulnerability, which indicates that the magnitude of drought in 2016 was so large that the chance of fallingbelow the poverty line as a result of an even higher magnitude shock was low. These results suggest thatidentifying vulnerable households is key in designing adaptive social safety net programs that can be scaled up tocover those who become eligible for such programs after experiencing shocks.

Keywords: Inequality; Natural Disasters; Disability; Services & Transfers to Poor; Access of Poor to Social Services; Economic Assistance; Educational Sciences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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