Vulnerability to poverty is an important social indicator of well-being. Yet, comparisons of vulnerability over time or space lack robustness as long as they are based on single measures or use specific poverty lines. We demonstrate that a distributional analysis, based on stochastic dominance...

Several measures of vulnerability to poverty have been suggested in the literature. In practise, only little is known about the robustness of vulnerability comparisons based on these often quite specific measures. The theory of stochastic orders can be applied to shed some light on such issues....

A major risk factor for rural areas in emerging market economies, such as Thailand and Vietnam, can be attributed to climate change. Adoption of effective ex-ante mitigation strategies is a function of socio-economic household and location characteristics including, among others, the decision...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude with an incentive compatible experiment with more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The survey measure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentally derived risk attitude. This is...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentive compatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The survey measure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentally derived risk attitude. This holds...

Livelihoods of rural households in Asia increasingly rely on off-farm income and remittances while dependence on land declines. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of villages in emerging market economies like Thailand using a typical Thai village as a case study....

Pesticide handling practices have a strong bearing on the exposure of toxic effects to target and nontarget organism. A clear understanding of determinants of pesticide handling practices is a precondition in the design and implementation of policy intervention. To accomplish this, a household...

This paper assesses the impact of contract farming in the oil palm industry in Indonesia on smallholders’ well-being and investigates its implication for poverty reduction. Data were collected randomly from 245 smallholders in the province of Jambi, Sumatra. A treatment effects model was...

Rural households in sub-Saharan Africa face many risks and are therefore often vulnerable to poverty. Income diversification has been proposed as a potentially effective strategy to mitigate their risks. This paper explores how portfolio decisions of fishery-dependent households in Cameroon...

This study investigates risk and time preferences of small-scale cattle farmers in West Africa and examines how demographic and socio-economic characteristics are related to these preferences. Using a maximum likelihood approach we jointly estimate risk and time preferences. Our findings show...