Explaining index based livestock insurance to pastoralists

Livestock production in arid and semi-arid rangelands is a risky enterprise. Covariate risk of catastrophic livestock loss due to drought is the most critical uninsured risk facing livestock producers. These losses can lead to persistent poverty. We are trying to design an index based livestock insurance (IBLI) program as a viable means to help pastoralists in northern Kenya manage such covariate risk of livestock losses due to drought. A predicted livestock mortality index – established from a statistical relationship between satellite-generated vegetation imagery and historical records of community level livestock losses – represents an objectively, cost effectively measured and non-human manipulable index that triggers insurance payout. The insurance is offered by private insurance companies. The advantages of reduced transaction costs and asymmetric information problems, however, come at the cost of increased basis risk, which refers to the imperfect correlation between an insured‟s loss experience and the index. We have developed a game that explains to pastoralists how such an insurance product could work. We built in the game both covariate and idiosyncratic shocks, and use a subsistence constraint to generate bifurcating asset dynamics, observed empirically in the targeted communities. This paper describes how the game was designed, how it was used in the field, and presents findings on how individuals played the game. The paper concludes by discussing how these findings are being used in the design and broader extension of the index based insurance product

FAKTOR-FAKTOR YANG MEMPENGARUHI MUTU KINERJA AUDITOR DENGAN ETOS KERJA SEBAGAI VARIABEL MODERATING

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menguji faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi mutu kinerja auditor dengan etos kerja sebagai variabel moderating. Data yang diperoleh pada penelitian ini yaitu dari para Auditor yang bekerja di Kantor Inspektorat Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan yang menjadi responden. Untuk mengumpulkan data digunakan data primer yang diperoleh melalui pembagian lembar kuesioner yang berisi pernyataan-pernyataan yang ditujukan kepada 49 responden. Pada penelitian ini metode analisis data yang digunakan  yaitu analisis regresi linier berganda dan analisis regresi moderasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa tekanan anggaran waktu, integritas, dan motivasi berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap mutu kinerja auditor. Dan etos kerja berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap hubungan antara tekanan anggaran waktu, integritas, motivasi terhadap mutu kinerja auditor. Hal ini berarti semakin tinggi tingkat tekanan anggaran waktu, integritas, motivasi, dan etos kerja seorang auditor maka akan sangat mempengaruhi mutu kinerja auditor yang akan semakin baik

Developing Index Based Livestock Insurance for managing livestock asset risks in Northern Kenya

This study develops an index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product for managing key livestock asset risks of pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid lands of northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of persistent poverty. It uses a combination of field experiments and surveys conducted in summer 2008, and pre-existing household-level panel data sets in: (1) designing a market-viable contract; (2) conducting ex-ante householdlevel welfare analysis; and (3) eliciting willingness to pay (WTP) for the product among the targeted population. IBLI offers compensation based on a predicted location aggregate livestock mortality index constructed from a strong statistical relationship between household herd mortality rates and high quality, objectively verifiable, remotely-sensed measures of vegetative cover on rangelands that are not manipulable by insured parties. It thus has potential to resolve the transaction costs and asymmetric information problems that cripple traditional insurance. The presence of a threshold-based poverty trap in East African pastoralism leads to nonlinear IBLI valuation, as found both in the simulation-based welfare analysis and in WTP estimates elicited through field surveys and experiments. This implies that IBLI could be both a commercially viable insurance product for better-off pastoralists, as well as a pro-poor instrument to use as a safety net for pastoralists vulnerable to losing their herds and collapsing into chronic poverty. The IBLI contract originally designed in this study has been slightly modified and launched in a pilot in January 2010 in the Marsabit district of northern Kenya by a Kenyan commercial insurer with retail distribution/brokerage by a leading private financial institution, international reinsurance by Swiss Reinsurance, with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) leading the effort and the associated monitoring and evaluation program

Willingness to pay for index based livestock insurance: results from a field experiment in northern Kenya

Submitted to American Journal of Agricultural Economics, October 200

The performance of index based livestock insurance: ex ante assessment in the presence of a poverty trap

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a new index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product designed to compensate for area average predicted livestock mortality loss in northern Kenya, where previous work has established the presence of poverty traps. We simulate household-specific wealth dynamics based on a model parameterized using rich panel and experimental data from the region. The simulations allow us to investigate patterns of willingness to pay for asset index insurance that is imperfectly correlated with individuals' loss experience. The bifurcated livestock dynamics associated with the poverty trap gives rise to insurance valuation that is highly nonlinear in individual herd size. Willingness to pay among vulnerable groups who most need insurance are, on average, lower than commercially viable rates but subsidization of IBLI premiums appears to offer more cost-effective poverty reduction than direct transfers to the poor

Designing index based livestock insurance for managing asset risk in northern Kenya

This paper describes a novel effort at developing index-based insurance for locationaveraged livestock mortality as a means to fill an important void in the risk management instruments available to protect the main asset of pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of the existence of poverty traps. We describe the detailed methodology in designing such insurance contract with the underlying index uniquely constructed off explicit statistical predictions established using longitudinal observations of household-level herd mortality, fit to high quality, objectively verifiable remotely sensed vegetation data not manipulable by either party to the contract and available at low cost and in near-real time. The resulting index performs very well out of sample, both when tested against other complementing household-level herd mortality data from the same region and period and when compared qualitatively with community level drought experiences over the past 27 years. We describe contract pricing and potential risk exposures of the underwriter using a rich time series of satellite-based vegetation data available from 1982-present. And finally, implementation opportunities and challenges are discussed to spur the product’s pilot potential