When: wednesday December 19th, 15.00

Where: 5411.0743

Abstract:

Vulnerability is a challenge in the welfare of households (Chaudhuri et al 2002, Dercon 2005). A household may be non-poor today but vulnerable to poverty tomorrow and a poor household today may face the probability of remaining poor or falling into deeper poverty tomorrow. There is some evidence that financial inclusion offers households a route to improving their welfare and escaping vulnerability but this evidence does not always appear to hold. Yet we do know that productive use of access to finance can help a household to be on the path of a sustained economic livelihood. The combination of financial inclusion and access to productive activity may therefore be key to reducing household vulnerability to poverty. We however do not have much evidence on this. In this study, I use the LSMS household data from Ghana to compute vulnerability estimates for households and attempt to show how household vulnerability reduces, when access to finance is combined with households’ access to land.