Speaker
Description
The question “How resilient are rural households?” is becoming an important research issue, especially in the context of more frequent and severe shocks in rural areas of developing countries. We use balanced panel data from 3367 households from Thailand and Vietnam collected in 2010, 2013, and 2016 to estimate a (latent) variable reflecting resilience capacity of rural households and examine the influences of resilience capacity on mitigating the impact of shocks and improving household welfare. We employ a generalized structural equation model (GSEM) to estimate the latent variable representing households’ resilience capacity. The results from fixed-effects estimations show that the lagged resilience capacity of rural households has a significant and negative correlation with losses caused by shocks. Moreover, the results of fixed-effects estimations with a control function approach indicate that an improvement in the resilience capacity can prevent rural households from falling into poverty in absolute and multidimensional terms.
