Crisis Coping Strategies in Bangladesh

Meherun Ahmed, Asian University for Women

The relationship between poverty and natural disasters in the developing world has been a topic of interest and debate among the academics and the policy makers. Households plan strategically to smooth consumption in the event of income shocks followed by an exogenous natural calamity. The set of coping strategies adopted by households depend on a number of factors, especially, the types of crises the households face and opportunities available to them. In the absence of any safety net, credit and insurance, these households may never be able to replenish their stock of assets and remain in poverty perpetually. Using a new nationally representative dataset from Bangladesh, the broad objective of this paper is to identify different coping mechanism adopted by affected households in the presence of a very thin insurance market and differential access to formal and informal credit markets.