IFPRI researchers Md. Sadat Anowar and Mir Raihanul Islam submitted the abstract, "Understanding shocks, stressors, and resilience dynamics in rural Bangladesh" to the 6th SANEM Annual Economists' Conference (SAEC) 2023, which was presented in February 2023.
Background
According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), resilience is defined as “the ability of people, households, communities, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth.” The negative shocks and stresses are occurrences and patterns that impact well-being consequences and resilience abilities of the future. By this definition, household resilience is the household’s capability to alleviate, adjust to, and recuperate from negative shocks and vulnerabilities.
Objective
We have assessed the major economic, social, and environmental shocks faced by rural households in Bangladesh. We conducted a cross-sectional analysis and evaluated the extent (severity) of shocks and the household’s ability to recover to from these stresses by poverty status. We further investigated whether the respondents believe the local government would help the community with future shocks and stresses and by wealth quintile. In short, we wanted to understand the magnitude of various shocks faced by rural households and how resilient they were in the context of rural Bangladesh using two separate indices.
Methods
We used cross-sectional data from the 2018-19 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS). The BIHS is a nationally representative rural survey of Bangladesh which is representative at the divisional level. Respondents to the resilience and food security module (n=5,604 households) of the BIHS Survey were asked whether their households experienced 16 shocks or stressors during the 12 months preceding the survey. For any shock experienced, the respondents were asked to rate the severity of the shock or stressor on the household’s income and food consumption using the same four-point Likert scale for each of the shocks. This information was used to calculate the shock exposure index (SEI). SEI is a weighted average of the incidence of each shock, weighted by perceived severity of the shock of each household. In cross-sectional surveys, it is challenging to collect information on “actual recovery” therefore, the BIHS survey collected information on the Ability to Recover from Shocks and Stresses Index (ARSSI), a proxy indicator for “actual recovery” that captures a household’s self-perceived ability to recover from the shocks and stresses that occur in the sample. The index comprised two components: (1) a base ability to recover component that captured how households were currently able to meet food needs relative to the past year, and (2) a forward-looking component that captured how households expect to be able to manage shocks and stresses in the future. The ARSSI corrected the ability to recover index for differences in shock exposure among households and was therefore comparable across households. The ARSSI included the typical types of shocks and stressors that occur in the sample, such as loss of a family member, loss of income, hunger, drought, flood, conflict, or similar events, and was based on data regarding the shocks and stressors that households experienced in the year prior to the survey and their perceived ability to meet food needs the following year.
Results
Our findings show that at the national level, severe illness has been the biggest stressor for rural Bangladesh during the last 12 months prior to survey data collection in 2018-19, which was even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Too much rain has been identified as the second major shock at the national rural level, which can be associated with the adverse effects of climate change faced by rural communities in Bangladesh. On the other hand, according to the shock exposure index (SEI), more than half (56.7 per cent) of the sampled households reported not to face any of the sixteen shocks, whereas 13.8 percent of the respondent households of the survey reported to experience high level of shocks (shock experience index score between 7 to 41). We then looked into the ‘Ability to Recover from Shocks and Stresses Index (ARSSI)’ which had a mean score of 5.4. This score is then disaggregated by poor and non-poor households, and we found a statistically significant result at the 0.1 per cent level. So, we can conclude that poverty status has a statistically significant relationship with household’s ability to recover from shocks and stresses. Lastly, we explored household’s perception regarding whether the local governments would help the communities to cope up with future shocks. About 73.0 per cent of the sample reported to believe that the local governments would play an effective role. This is further disaggregated into shock experience level.
Conclusions
The dataset used for this research is from pre-covid period and existing literature suggests that various shocks and stresses has increased manyfold due to the pandemic and the recent price hike observed in Bangladesh. Some interesting findings from this study can be used to better understand the prevalent shocks and vulnerabilities that exist at the national rural level, and our findings call for coherent sets of policies and investments toward formulating risk mitigation and promoting resilience in rural Bangladesh, especially for the rural poor.
Keywords: Bangladesh, Resilience, Economic shocks, Environmental shocks, South Asia
Funding: This study was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP) in Bangladesh under USAID Grant Number EEM-G-00-04-00013-00.
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