An improved agricultural household margin insurance scheme with insured–insurer risk protection: a time-varying copula approach

Abstract

Agricultural household margin insurance (AHMI) is a crop insurance scheme that considers a farmer's trading capability. The scheme examines farmers' losses in terms of both agricultural input and output using the farmer exchange rate index. In this article, we improve the previous design of the AHMI [A. Ahdika, D. Rosadi, A.R. Effendie, and Gunardi, Household margin insurance of agricultural sector in Indonesia using a farmer exchange rate index, Agric. Finance Rev. 81 (2020), pp. 169–188.] proposed to be implemented in Indonesia – which only provided risk protection for companies – by broadening the formula of losses so that risk protection covers both farmers and companies. We also provide premium payment scenarios, both seasonally and non-seasonally. We employ a time-varying Student-t copula with the extended dynamic parameter to identify the dynamic dependency between the indexes involved in determining the loss variable. We also determine the premium rate for the insurance scheme with various payment scenarios and investigate the implications for farmer survival and company management. Examining the farmer exchange rate index data of Indonesia, the empirical results show that the improved AHMI using a time-varying copula approach produces more reasonable loss estimates and various premium payment options with low premium rates for farmers, compared to either the previous AHMI design or the current crop insurance program in Indonesia.