Climate Resilience Pathways of Rural Households. Evidence from Ethiopia

28 Pages Posted: 8 Oct 2018

See all articles by Solomon Asfaw

Solomon Asfaw

United Nations - Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Giuseppe Maggio

LUISS Guido Carli University; University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics

Alessandro Palma

Gran Sasso Science Institute; University of Rome Tor Vergata - Centre for International Studies on Economic Growth (CEIS); DISAE - Department of Business and Economics

Date Written: October 2018

Abstract

This paper explores the resilience capacity of rural Ethiopian households after the drought shock occurred in 2011. The work develops an original empirical framework able to capture the policy and socio-economic determinants of households’ resilience capacity by making parametric statistical assumption on the resilience distribution. To this end, the analysis employs a two-wave representative panel dataset aligned with detailed weather records while controlling for a large set of household- and community-level characteristics. The analysis shows that the majority of these factors affects significantly resilience capacity only in the group of households affected by the drought shock, suggesting that the observed effect relates to the adaptive capacity enabled by these factors, rather than a simple welfare effect. Three policy indications emerge from the findings of the empirical model. First, government support programmes, such as the PSNP, appear to sustain households’ resilience by helping them to reach the level of pre-shock total consumption, but have no impact on the food-consumption resilience. Secondly, the “selling out assets strategy” affects positively on households’ resilience, but only in terms of food consumption. Finally, the of informal institutions, such as social networks providing financial support, sharply increases households’ resilience by them to reach pre-shock levels of food and total consumption. Policies incentivizing the formation of these networks, through the participation of households to agricultural cooperative, agricultural associations, or community projects, may also help farmers in recovering their wealth level after a weather shock.

Keywords: resilience, adaptation, livelihood strategy, food security, climate change, Ethiopia, drought.

JEL Classification: Q12, Q18, I32; C130

Suggested Citation

Asfaw, Solomon and Maggio, Giuseppe and Palma, Alessandro, Climate Resilience Pathways of Rural Households. Evidence from Ethiopia (October 2018). SWPS 2018-18, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3268107 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3268107

Solomon Asfaw

United Nations - Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) ( email )

Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
Rome, Lazio 00100
ITALY

Giuseppe Maggio

LUISS Guido Carli University ( email )

Viale Romania 32
Rome, Roma 00100
Italy

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics ( email )

Via Columbia n.2
Rome, rome 00100
Italy

Alessandro Palma (Contact Author)

Gran Sasso Science Institute ( email )

viale Francesco Crispi, 7
L'Aquila, 67100
Italy

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Centre for International Studies on Economic Growth (CEIS) ( email )

Via Columbia, 2
Rome, I-00133
Italy

DISAE - Department of Business and Economics ( email )

Italy

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/view/alessandropalma/home

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