University Carlos III of Madrid Researcher Has Provided New Data on Risk Management (Risk management in traditional agriculture: intercropping in Italian wine production): Risk Management

2023 SEP 19 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Investigators discuss new findings in risk management. According to news reporting originating from the University Carlos III of Madrid by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “In this paper, we provide an economic interpretation of intercropping as a risk management strategy based on spatial diversification of production.”

Financial supporters for this research include Spain’s State Research Agency (Aei) of The Ministry of Science And Innovation; Spanish Ministry of Economy And Competitiveness.

Our news correspondents obtained a quote from the research from University Carlos III of Madrid: “We study vine intercropping, i.e., the scattering of vines across fields rather than concentrating them in specialized vineyards, a traditional practice in Italian agriculture. We argue that, in the absence of developed financial markets, spatial diversification provided a third layer of insurance for peasants operating in traditional agrarian economies, distinct from and in addition to crop diversification at the farm level and risk sharing through tenancy contracts at the estate level. Spatial diversification increased production costs, particularly transportation costs. Therefore, the price of this form of insurance (and the likelihood of its adoption) depended critically on rural settlement patterns. We test our model with data from Italy in the 1930s, when intercropping still prevailed in many areas of the country.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “We show that its adoption was positively related to the pattern of scattered dwellings that dated back to the late Middle Ages and reduced transportation costs to individual plots. The mass exodus from the countryside during the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s made intercropping no longer viable.”

For more information on this research see: Risk management in traditional agriculture: intercropping in Italian wine production. European Review of Economic History, 2023. The publisher for European Review of Economic History is Oxford University Press (OUP).

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/head017.

Our news editors report that more information may be obtained by contacting Pablo Martinelli Lasheras, University of Carlos III of Madrid Department of Social Sciences, Spain. Additional authors for this research include Giovanni Federico.

ORCID is an identifier for authors and includes bibliographic information. The following is ORCID information for the author of this research: Pablo Martinelli Lasheras (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3529-4654).

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