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Maize production in China is exposed to pronounced yield risks, in particular weather risk, which is one of the most important and least controllable sources of risk in agriculture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which weather index-based insurance can contribute to reducing the revenue risk in maize production caused by yield variations. An average farm producing maize is analyzed for each of eight Chinese provinces, six of which are part of the Northern Plains of China.

Data are based on the Statistical Yearbook of China and the Chinese Meteorological Administration. The used method of insurance pricing is burn analysis. Hedging effectiveness of precipitation index-based insurance is measured by the relative reduction of the standard deviation (SD) and the Value at Risk of maize revenues.

Results reveal that precipitation index-based insurance can cause a reduction of up to 15.2 percent of the SD and 38.7 percent of the Value at Risk with a 90 percent confidence level of maize revenues in the study area. However, there are big differences in the hedging efficiencies of precipitation index-based insurance measured at different weather stations in the various provinces. Therefore, it is recommended for insurance providers to analyze the hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance with regard to the geographical location of their reference weather station if they would like to offer weather index-based insurance products.

The absence of individual, long-term yield data in the study area prevents the evaluation of risk on individual farms. Thus, the hedging effectiveness can only be analyzed on an aggregated level of yield data and can rather be modeled for an average farm of a particular province.

To the author's knowledge, this paper is the first that investigates the hedging effectiveness of precipitation index-based insurance designed for reducing revenue risk of maize production in eight Chinese provinces.

Since the 1990s, there has been a discussion about the use of weather index‐based insurance, also called weather derivatives, as a new instrument to hedge against volumetric risks in agriculture. It particularly differs from other insurance schemes by pay‐offs being related to objectively measurable weather variables. Due to the absence of individual farm yield time series, the hedging effectiveness of weather index‐based insurance is often estimated on the basis of aggregated farm data. The authors expect that there are differences in the hedging effectiveness of insurance on the aggregated level and on the individual farm‐level. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the magnitude of bias which occurs if the hedging effectiveness of weather index‐based insurance is estimated on aggregated yield data.

The study is based on yield time series from individual farms in central Germany and weather data provided by the German Meteorological Service. Insurance is structured as put‐option on a cumulated precipitation index. The analysis includes the estimation of the hedging effectiveness of insurance on aggregated level and on individual farm‐level. The hedging effectiveness is measured non‐parametrically regarding the relative reduction of the standard deviation and the value at risk of wheat revenues.

Findings indicate that the hedging effectiveness of a weather index‐based insurance estimated on aggregated level is considerably higher than the realizable hedging effectiveness on the individual farm‐level. This refers to: hedging effectiveness estimated on the aggregated level is higher than the mean of realized hedging effectiveness on the individual farm‐level and almost every evaluated individual farm in the analysis realizes a lower hedging effectiveness than estimated on the aggregated level of the study area. Nevertheless, weather index‐based insurance designed on the aggregated level can lead to a notable risk reduction for individual farms.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first that analyzes the influence of crop yield aggregation with regard to the hedging effectiveness of weather index‐based insurance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that weather shocks can play in the livestock mortality microinsurance take-up when the insured risk has a prevalent covariant component.

The sample consists of 360 rural Ethiopian households. Data were collected in a panel-structure at the end of three agricultural seasons (2011-2013). In the questionnaire, a specific section on insurance was meant to collect information on the farmer’s willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a set of insurance products, including livestock mortality insurance. Two OLS regression models and a quantile regression model were employed to estimate the impact of weather anomalies on the WTP for the insurance product.

The authors find that weather anomalies contribute to changes in the WTP to a large extent. Negative (positive) changes in precipitation (temperature) anomalies can lead to more than a 30 percent reduction in the WTP. This general finding is complemented with the analysis of the conditional distribution of the WTP, which shows that other elements can prevail for low values of the conditional distribution. In this case, the WTP seems to be represented more by the interviewee’s age and basic knowledge of insurance, and village fixed-effects. Basic knowledge of insurance, in particular, can increase WTP by about 60 percent.

This paper has straightforward implications from a policy perspective. It suggests that farmers would prefer an insurance premium that follows the changes in the systemic component. On the contrary, insurance as well as reinsurance companies are usually reluctant to frequently revise their premiums. Financial education programs, farmer-driven design, trust building, and bundling insurance with other financial and non-financial products can increase the value proposition perceived by the farmers. From a marketing perspective, the overall findings suggest that continuous fine-tuning of the contract, transparency, and targeted information campaigns can contribute to increase and stabilize potential customers’ WTP.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that considers the impact of weather shocks on the WTP for a livestock mortality insurance product. Livestock is one of the most strategic assets of poor rural households in Africa. This study contributes to the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of weather insurance take-up in developing countries and, in particular, the role of spatiotemporal adverse selection and basis risk (e.g. Jensen et al., 2016).

Conceptualizing development in terms of risk management has become a prominent feature of mainstream development discourse. This has led to a convergence between the rubrics of financial inclusion and risk management whereby improved access for poor households to private sector credit, insurance and savings products is represented as a necessary step toward building “resilience.” This convergence, however, is notable for a shallow understanding of the production and distribution of risks. By naturalizing risk as an inevitable product of complex systems, the approach fails to interrogate how risk is produced and displaced unevenly between social groups. Ignoring the structural and relational dimensions of risk production leads to an overly technical approach to risk management that is willfully blind to the intersection of risk and social power. A case study of the promotion of index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia – held as a model for innovative risk management via financial inclusion – is used to indicate the tensions and contradictions of this projected synthesis of development and risk management.

This paper presents the systematic process framework to develop the suitable crop insurance for each agriculture farming region which has individual differences of associated crop, climate condition, including applicable technology to be implemented in crop insurance practice. This paper also studies the adoption of new insurance scheme to assess the willingness to join crop insurance program.

Crop insurance development has been performed through IDDI conceptual framework to illustrate the specific crop insurance diagram. Area-yield insurance as a type of index-based insurance advantages on reducing basis risk, adverse selection and moral hazard. This paper therefore aims to develop area-yield crop insurance, at a provincial level, focusing on rice insurance scheme for the protection of flood. The diagram demonstrates the structure of area-yield rice insurance associates with selected machine learning algorithm to evaluate indemnity payment and premium assessment applicable for Jasmine 105 rice farming in Ubon Ratchathani province. Technology acceptance model (TAM) is used for new insurance adoption testing.

The framework produces the visibly informative structure of crop insurance. Random Forest is the algorithm that gives high accuracy for specific collected data for rice farming in Ubon Ratchathani province to evaluate the rice production to calculate an indemnity payment. TAM shows that the level of adoption is high.

This paper originates the framework to generate the viable crop insurance that suitable to individual farming and contributes the idea of technology implementation in the new service of crop insurance scheme.

Farmer exchange rate (FER) is the ratio between a farmer's income and expenditure and is also an indicator of farmers’ welfare. There is little research regarding its use in risk modeling in crop insurance. This study seeks to propose a design for a household margin insurance scheme of the agricultural sector based on FER.

This research employs various risk modeling concepts, i.e. value at risk, loss models and premium calculation, to construct the proposed model. The standard linear, static and time-varying copula models are used to identify the dependency between variables involved in calculating FER.

First, FER can be considered as the primary variable for risk modeling in agricultural household margin insurance because it demonstrates farmers’ financial ability. Second, temporal dependence estimated using the time-varying copula can minimize errors, reduce the premium rate and result in a tighter guarantee's level of security.

This research extends the previous similar studies related to the use of index ratio in margin insurance loss modeling. Its authenticity is in the use of FER, which represents the farmers' trading capability. FER determines farmers’ losses by considering two aspects: the farmers’ income rate and their ability to fulfill their life and farming needs. Also, originality exists in the use of the time-varying copulas in identifying the dependence of the indices involved in calculating FER.

The purpose of this paper is to assess farmers’ willingness to participate and pay for weather-based index insurance in the Upper East Region of Ghana, and what factors influence the participation and purchase of crop insurance schemes.

A survey of 200 farmers in the region was carried out in 2018 to measure demographic information, farm characteristics, risks and risk-management practices and attitudes to crop insurance programs. The survey also captured maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for crop insurance. The double-bounded contingent valuation technique was used to estimate the WTP for crop insurance and the variables that affected WTP.

Farmers, in general, had an indifferent attitude to crop insurance in the region, but were willing to participate in the crop insurance programme, and were willing to pay between 7.5 and 12.5 per cent of the cost of growing maize as a premium for crop insurance. Demographic and economic variables did not impact WTP, but attitude towards crop insurance, farm diversification and frequency of drought negatively impacted on the WTP for crop insurance.

Education programs could be undertaken to improve the attitude and understanding towards crop insurance, as some farmers perceived the programme as not trustworthy, and others did not truly understand the operation of the programme.

Drought can have a significant impact on household welfare, particularly in food insecure countries or regions. Crop insurance can provide a method of securing income for farmers allowing them to purchase food rather than other choices, such as removing children from education to reduce household expenses, improving the long-term welfare of the farm household.

This paper considers willingness to participate and WTP for a crop insurance programme in Ghana, it is one of a small number of papers that consider attitude to, and willingness to participate and WTP for crop insurance in developing countries. The value of the research is the expanded understanding of farmer attitude to crop insurance and their lack of knowledge of crop insurance operations.

Following the call for strengthening the third pillar of knowledge in entrepreneurship as well as work-applied management contexts constituted by pragmatic design principles, we present a case study on an insurtech for insurance firms specialized in smart contract insurance solutions such as flight delay or ski resort insurance.

Design science.

This not only serves as a pointer for how insurances may master their digital transformation while remaining competitive. But moreover, on the meta level, we find that the adoption of entrepreneurial design principles by the students, whose experiential project represents our case study, does not necessarily require continuous support or foundational knowledge to be delivered beforehand. However, for a deeper or more holistic assessment of the case sketched in their project, it makes sense to introduce them to newer developments such as the simple, practical framework of the Entrepreneur's Question Index.

Innovative teaching method on innovative topics.

The purpose of this paper is to review some challenges of insuring weather risk in agriculture and to discuss potential remedies for these problems.

The paper is developed as a narrative on weather insurance based largely on existing literature.

Weather risks show characteristics that often violate classical requirements for insurability. First, some weather risks, particularly slowly emerging weather perils like drought, are spatially correlated and cause systemic risks. Second, climatic change may increase the volatility of weather variables and lead to non-stationary loss distributions, which causes difficulties in actuarial ratemaking. Third, limited availability of yield and weather data hinders the estimation of reliable loss distributions.

Some of the approaches discussed in this review, such as time diversification, local test procedures and the augmentation of observational data by expert knowledge, can be useful for crop insurance companies to improve their risk management and product design.

This study provides background and development information regarding weather insurance and also presents statistical tools and actuarial methods that support the assessment of weather risks as well as the design of weather and yield insurance products.

This paper investigates Chinese agricultural insurance agents willingness to offer (WTO) livestock insurance based on the variations of eight main attributes of livestock insurance.

This study implements discrete choice experiments (DCE) with actual insurance agents who design, sell and operate livestock insurance in China. The choice experiment of this study is based on the D-optimal approach, a six-block design, with 15 cards per block and two choices per card. The sample size was 211. Econometrics results are based on conditional and mixed logit models.

The authors find that the subsidy effect is enormous; a one level increase of subsidy leads to 3.166 times higher probability to offer. This subsidy effect is important as it confirms the endogenous structure between price and quantity in insurance offering, where subsidy does not only incentivize demand but also the supply. Another main factor of insurance investigated is the impact of different coverage types on agents' WTO. The authors find that agents prefer mortality insurance the most, followed by revenue insurance and profit insurance, while Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) is the least preferred to offer. Agents' knowledge about these newer types of insurance supports their WTO as well; thus, proper education is necessary to promote the more advanced types of livestock insurance.

A limitation is that in the presence of COVID 19, and administrative issues at the local level, the sample was not randomly drawn. Nonetheless, the authors believe that there is enough diversity across participants, insurers and provinces and have done sufficient robustness checks to support results and conclusions.

This study provides further validation for the DCE research method that could potentially be applied to different analyses: using choice experiments to study insurers and reveal their preferences, through combinations of various levels of core attributes for insurance products. The findings and contribution are critical to the reform and improvement of livestock insurance in China and for insurance markets more broadly. The authors find that insurers do not place equal weights or values on insurance product attributes and do not view types of insurance equally. In other words, while farmers may hold different preferences about the type of insurance they demand, the results suggest that insurers also hold preferences in the type of insurance they sell.

So far as the authors are aware, this is the first DCE designed around the supply of insurance products with the subjects being insurance agents, marketers and executives.