Insurance, Credit, and Technology Adoption : Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi

Giné ; , Xavier ; Yang, Dean

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS TO CAPITAL;    ACCESS TO CREDIT;    ACCESS TO INFORMATION;    ADVERTISEMENTS;    AGRICULTURAL ACTIVITIES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4425
RP-ID  :  WPS4425

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The adoption of new agriculturaltechnologies may be discouraged because of their inherentriskiness. This study implemented a randomized fieldexperiment to ask whether the provision of insurance againsta major source of production risk induces farmers to takeout loans to invest in a new crop variety. The study samplewas composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers inMalawi, where by far the dominant source of production riskis the level of rainfall. We randomly selected half of thefarmers to be offered credit to purchase high-yieldinghybrid maize and improved groundnut seeds for planting inthe November 2006 crop season. The other half of the farmerswere offered a similar credit package but were also requiredto purchase (at actuarially fair rates) a weather insurancepolicy that partially or fully forgave the loan in the eventof poor rainfall. Surprisingly, take up was lower by 13percentage points among farmers offered insurance with theloan. Take-up was 33.0 percent for farmers who were offeredthe uninsured loan. There is suggestive evidence that thereduced take-up of the insured loan was due to the highcognitive cost of evaluating the insurance: insured loantake-up was positively correlated with farmer educationlevels. By contrast, the take-up of the uninsured loan wasuncorrelated with farmer education.