Revealing the Willingness To Pay for income insurance in agriculture
04.09.2014
04.09.2014
12:00 - 13:30
In spite of its minor and decreasing share in EU GDP agriculture still plays a fundamental and strategic role in many areas of the economy. This is why the EU has put much effort during the last decades in guaranteeing a stable agricultural income. However, conventional income stabilization tools have been showing recently signs of exhaustion. Under this critical juncture, EU institutions have encouraged the expansion of agricultural insurance. With different degrees of public support, insurance systems against several risks have been successfully developed across the EU and have adopted increasingly comprehensive forms. Eventually, EU institutions have started to assess the development of a comprehensive income insurance framework. Income insurance covers a wider variety of risks and has higher costs and uncertainty than conventional single risk or combined yield insurance. This may demand a higher and even unsustainable degree of public support. Assessing and enhancing the sustainability of income insurance demands an in depth knowledge of farmers’ Willingness To Pay (WTP) for this product. This work presents a methodology that calculates the WTP for different degrees of income protection using a Revealed Preferences Model and the Certainty Equivalent theory.