Are Livestock s keepers more resilient to climate shocks: Fact or Artifact?

This paper provides new empirical evidence on climate change adaptation using a dataset that covers 19 countries from four continents. More specifically, we focus on the role of livestock as ex-ante risk management strategy and self-insurance coping-strategy against climatic shocks. There are at least two channels through which livestock can play this role. From the one hand, it can be viewed as a form of ex-ante precautionary savings, which can be liquidated ex-post to smooth consumption, if needed. From the other hand, livestock and livestock diversification can increase resilience, i.e. the household capacity of recovering from external shocks. Given these premise, our study merge together several longitudinal surveys (n=223,372) with Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration index data, our proxy of climatic shocks, in order to study the interlinkage among livestock, household welfare and resilience. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cross-country analysis in this field of literature. Our results show, among other things, that: firstly, livestock has a significant contribution to household welfare and resilience in most of the samples considered in the analysis; secondly, climatic crises tend to be regressive, and poorer households are generally more affected; thirdly, country specificity matters. Acknowledgement