International journal of

ADVANCED AND APPLIED SCIENCES

EISSN: 2313-3724, Print ISSN:2313-626X

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 Volume 6, Issue 6 (June 2019), Pages: 51-59

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 Original Research Paper

 Title: Application of weather index-based insurance for paddy yield: The case of Malaysia

 Author(s): Yvonne Wong Jing Wen *, Raja Rajeswari Ponnusamy, Ho Ming Kang

 Affiliation(s):

 School of Mathematics, Actuarial and Quantitative Studies, Asia Pacific University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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 * Corresponding Author. 

  Corresponding author's ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7179-9994

 Digital Object Identifier: 

 https://doi.org/10.21833/ijaas.2019.06.008

 Abstract:

Agriculture is primarily vulnerable to vagaries of the weather. The impact of climate change is always intertwined with agricultural production. Therefore, in order to manage these losses, agricultural insurance should be initiated in Malaysia to the farmers to handle the financial risks associated with the impact of weather conditions on the crop yield. This study presents the results of a pilot scale investigation on weather index-based paddy insurance in five selected states in Malaysia. The aim of this study is to determine the appropriateness of this insurance model for each selected paddy cropping zone in Malaysia. Suitable weather indexes were chosen based on the relationship of these indexes and the paddy yield in each zone by employing the method of Ordinary Least Square regression and robust regression. The weather index-based insurance contract is designed based on the natural phenomenon and the time trend had been removed in order to reduce the basis risk. By investigating the relationship, a paddy insurance contract was then designed. However, the results showed that three paddy cropping zones are not suitable to uptake this index insurance as the regression models reported that the vagaries of weather did not cause a significant impact on the paddy yield of these states. This study reveals diversified insurance product design of each zone based on different weather indexes, which suggests that more weather variables should have to be taken into account in order to design a more robust weather-index insurance. 

 © 2019 The Authors. Published by IASE.

 This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

 Keywords: Weather index, Regression, Robust regression, Insurance

 Article History: Received 11 December 2018, Received in revised form 3 April 2019, Accepted 6 April 2019

 Acknowledgement:

No Acknowledgement.

 Compliance with ethical standards

 Conflict of interest:  The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

 Citation:

 Wen YWJ, Ponnusamy RR, and Kang HM (2019). Application of weather index-based insurance for paddy yield: The case of Malaysia. International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 6(6): 51-59

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 Figures

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 Tables

 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4 Table 5 Table 6 Table 7 Table 8 Table 9 Table 10 

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