Risk, Deprivation and Vulnerability Facing the Rural Poor of Bangladesh

	Paper No:30	Author:Syed M. Ahsan, Syed Abdul Hamid, M. A. Baqui Khalily, Shubhasish Barua and Chowdhury Abdullah Al Asif	886 Views	Pages:39

This paper analyzes the nexus among risk, deprivation and vulnerability that confront the rural poor in their daily life. It examines the nature of shocks, the consequent economic burden, and the coping mechanisms. It explains how shocks affect deprivation and vulnerability of households to poverty. The prominent shocks are health, death, crop, property and livestock, typically of the idiosyncratic in nature, except possibly that of crop. However, the effects of such shocks are likely to be more adverse for households that have difficulty maintaining their consumption level above the poverty threshold. Capability deprivation is measured here by the food adequacy level of the household during the preceding 12 months. We use an ordered-probit model to estimate the effect of various shocks on food deprivation.