Italian subsidised crop insurance: what the role of policy changes

Risk management in agriculture is crucial and policymakers are implementing policy reforms to foster farmers’ adoption of ex-ante risk management tools such as crop insurance: their effectiveness is the core of policy evaluations exercises. The Italian subsidised crop insurance market has been interested by major reforms in 2013 and 2015. The 2013 reform removed subsidies to the mono-risk insurance contracts, whereas the 2015 reform replaced the multi- and pluri-risks contract schemes with packages, devoted to providing coverage over different set of adversities, thus altering the framework that has been used for several years. We highlight a correlation between the first reform and a drop in the quantity of insurance purchased, and between the latter reform and an increase in the value of the purchased insurance