Resilience to shocks in Malawian households

Building up resilience in agricultural households has assumed a critical role in development strategies in recent years because, it is argued, the costs of strengthening resilience are less than the recurring expenditure for disaster assistance. Relying on large household datasets from 2010 and 2013, we explored the resilience of Malawian households to the exogenous shocks of flooding and currency devaluation during this period. We utilised two strategies for understanding resilience. The first, a classification framework pioneered by Briguglio and others, categorises households into resilience and vulnerability spaces. The second approach employs econometric analysis to explore food security resilience. These two complementary analyses reveal that infrastructure, assets, education and non-agricultural employment opportunities contribute most to food security resilience

Does Culture Matter? A Test of the Harrison Hypothesis

ABSTRACT: This study utilizes unique data from the World Values Survey to test the hypothesis that fatalism and the practice of the Golden Rule influence the economic development of nations. We use standard econometric models that account for endogeneity to understand the relative roles of culture, productivity, institutions, and geography in explaining human flourishing. Our analysis supports Harrison’s cultural hypothesis and demonstrates that fatalism and altruism’s explanatory powers, in our full model, are no less powerful than productivity, institutions, and geography in explaining economic performance. However, transforming existing fatalistic and altruistic attitudes in a positive direction using public policy to provide greater support for human flourishing may prove more challenging than overcoming other development constraints