Public intervention in catastrophe insurance markets, supported by the donor community and the World Bank, should be country specific. Low-income countries, where the domestic non-life insurance market is undeveloped, should focus in the short term on the development of sovereign catastrophe...

This paper has been prepared for policy makers interested in establishing or strengthening financial strategies to increase the financial response capacity of governments of developing countries in the aftermath of natural disasters, while protecting their long-term fiscal balances. It analyzes...

India's crop insurance program is the world's largest with 25 million farmers insured. However, issues in design, particularly related to delays in claims settlement, have led to 95 million farmer households not being covered, despite significant government subsidy. To address this and other...

This paper describes the index-based livestock insurance program in Mongolia designed in the context of a World Bank lending operation with Government of Mongolia and implemented on a pilot basis in 2005. This program involves a combination of self-insurance by herders, market-based insurance,...

The authors propose a financial model to address the design of efficient risk financing strategies against natural disasters at the country level. It is simple enough to shed analytical light on some of the key issues but flexible and realistic enough to provide some quantitative guidance on the...