Crop Price Indemnified Loans for Farmers: A Pilot Experiment in Rural Ghana

Farmers face a particular set of risks that complicate the decision to borrow. We use a randomized experiment to investigate (1) the role of crop‐price risk in reducing demand for credit among farmers and (2) how risk mitigation changes farmers’ investment decisions. In Ghana, we offer farmers loans with an indemnity component that forgives 50 percent of the loan if crop prices drop below a threshold price. A control group is offered a standard loan product at the same interest rate. Loan uptake is high among all farmers and the indemnity component has little impact on uptake or other outcomes of interest.     

Credit Markets in Northern Nigeria: Credit as Insurance in a Rural Economy

This article addresses the issues of incomplete markets andimperfect information in the context of credit markets in ruralnorthern Nigeria. In much recent theoretical literature, theproblems of moral hazard and adverse selection are assumed tobe decisive for the organization of agrarian institutions. Incontrast, it is found that in the four villages surveyed credittransactions take advantage of the free flow of informationwithin rural communities. Information asymmetries between borrowerand lender are unimportant, and their institutional consequences—theuse of collateral and interlinked contracts—are absent.Credit transactions play a direct role in pooling risk betweenhouseholds through the use of contracts in which the repaymentowed by the borrower depends on the realization of random productionshocks by both the borrower and the lender.     

Consumption smoothing? Livestock,insurance and drought in rural Burkina Faso

This paper explores the extent of consumption smoothing between 1981 and 1985 in rural Burkina Faso. In particular, we examine the extent to which livestock, grain storage and inter-household transfers are used to smooth consumption against income risk. The survey coincided with a period of severe drought, so the results provide direct evidence on the effectiveness of these various insurance mechanisms when they are the most needed. We find evidence of little consumption smoothing. In particular, there is almost no risk sharing, and households rely almost exclusively on self-insurance in the form of adjustments to grain stocks to smooth out consumption. The outcome, however, is far from complete smoothing. Hence the main risk-coping strategies which are hypothesized in the literature (risk sharing and the use of assets as buffer stocks) were not effective during the survey period.