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This chapter discusses how rural households in Zouping County, Shandong Province, China, cope with increased economic risk and loss of pre-existing financial and insurance mechanisms. Many households are highly exposed to risk. They cope by relying their own devices such as saving and borrowing, and diversifying their sources of income. Explanations for weak insurance provision are studied and innovative insurance arrangements are proposed.

The risk-sharing and insurance strategies used by rural households to smooth consumption are investigated, using data from the ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) Village Level Studies. Self-insurance is the most important risk coping mechanism. Limits in self-insurance and high costs of risk-coping strategies suggest opportunities for institutions that can help households save, work, and accumulate buffer stock to cope with risk.

This chapter analyzes household behavior in response to land reform policies. It addresses how efficacious was land reform in engendering private landownership by examining the following: (1) types of land holdings rural households have; (2) behavioral responses according to age, education, income level, and social classification that may affect the enlargement of holdings by households; and (3) patterns of land rental.

This chapter examines rural credit cooperatives (RCCs) in the context of China's rural financial landscape, with particular emphasis on their significance to the rural economy and households. China's rural financial system serves roughly 800 million people, who live in large swaths of hinterland in the central and western provinces and in rural and peri-urban locales in the eastern coastal provinces. Despite a diverse range of credit demands, the official rural financial sector has been largely monopolized by RCCs and, until the late 1990s, the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China (ABC). Since 1998, the ABC has been offering poverty alleviation loans at a subsidized interest rate to rural households in poor counties. This chapter first provides an overview of China's rural financial sector before discussing the importance of rural savings for rural households. It then considers township and village enterprises and the history of RCCs, along with the informal credit sector. It shows that the savings of rural households have been channeled to finance urban development, reflecting an inherent urban bias in China's development strategy.

This chapter evaluates the impact of the 1997 economic crisis on the poor people in Indonesia. The analysis reveals that price increases have affected the cost of living of poor households disproportionally; the effects differ in urban and rural households. This chapter argues that that the notion that the very poor are so poor as to be insulated from international shocks is simply wrong because it was the poor in the Indonesian case that appear to be the most vulnerable.

This chapter provides an overview of the institutional design of Russia's land reform. It discusses the historical, policy, and legislative contexts that shaped this reform; the behavioral responses of rural households to land reform policies; and the economic and social effects of land reform policies. It also presents some basic characteristics and national trends that have emerged in landownership and in Russia's land market during its contemporary reform.

This chapter provides an introduction to the aim, theoretical approaches, main arguments, and contributions of the book. The aim of the research is to use an anthropological and historical approach to explore how the contestation among three major rural alignments—local governments, village communities, and rural households have transformed the structure of the current rural collective land ownership system in China. The author argues that the current land property regime in rural China is not a static system imposed by the state from above, but a hybrid resulting from the contestation among the above rural alignments. This research adds to the existing literature by shedding light on the roles played by rural settlements and rural households in shaping the parameters of the land property relations in rural China, and by revealing the continuing contestation among the rural alignments in agricultural production and the land market in the post-Mao reform period.

Irrigation projects can more than double per-acre crop yields and raise labor and other input demands, income, and consumption on the farms that get the water. As food production rises, food prices may fall, particularly in rural areas poorly integrated with outside markets. Benefits are transmitted to suppliers of labor and other inputs, food processors, and consumers. Poor households may be affected directly (if they get water) or indirectly (if their incomes increase or food costs fall). This chapter shows how to construct a model to evaluate the regional economy-wide impacts of an irrigation project. Irrigation projects in two districts of Tanzania are found to have large indirect impacts, with up to one-third of the benefits going to non-targeted households. Meanwhile, lower food prices have a slight negative effect on food producers in nearby valleys.