The practice of mutual insurance is conditioned by two types of transaction costs: "association" costs in establishing links with insurance partners and "extraction" costs in using these links to implement insurance transfers. Data on insurance-motivated water exchanges among households along...

Rural development policy addresses the welfare of rural households and communities. With a majority of the world's poor located in rural areas, the resilience of rural poverty in industrialized countries, and a significant share of environmental degradation the byproduct of rural poverty, the...

The third part of the book focuses on the effects of and policy responses to climate change. Chapters examine the effect of climate change on production, trade, land use patterns and livelihoods. They consider impacts on the distribution of income between developed and developing countries and...