Analyses of agricultural insurance failures often assume the existence of competitive supply, tracing the reasons for high insurance cost and limited farmer participation to informational problems, and suggesting the need for premium subsidization in order to increase participation. However, in countries such as Spain and Italy, where agricultural insurance is most highly subsidized, it could be that supply is not fully competitive. In this article, we explore the incidence of public subsidies to agricultural insurance premia when supply is noncompetitive. Through the use of a simple empirical model of an insurance market, it is shown that, while in the case of a competitive supply, subsidies to insurance would benefit farmers, a monopolistic supply would capture most of the subsidy, thus eliminating the potential incentive towards wider participation by farmers. The model is applied to a panel of Italian farms for different levels of risk aversion to demonstrate the limited effect that a subsidy to a hypothetical all risk yield insurance would have on farmer participation in the case of monopolistic supply.

In 2003 and 2004, an insurance product that protects against market risks of agricultural commodities was offered in Spain. It consists on a revenue insurance product which has been launched as a pilot program for mid-season and late potato in five Spanish provinces (Álava, Burgos, La Rioja, León and Valladolid). The objective of this article is to describe the characteristics of this insurance product and to perform a preliminary evaluation of the seasons it was marketed. We start from a conceptual approach to the market risk management instruments, that constitute the context for the current program. Later, we explain the price model used to define market reference prices and the premia, checking the quality of the statistical price model against the potato farm-gate prices. Finally, the article ends with a preliminary valuation/ assessment of this first pilot experience in Spain, stressing those aspects which are liable/prone to be improved and reckoning the possible extensions of this insurance line to other potato varieties, provinces and also to other agricultural commodities.

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This paper analises a set of revenue stabilisation policies for Spanish olive oil growers, including yield and revenue insurance schemes. In theory and under certain assumptions, revenue insurance provides cheaper revenue stabilisation than a combination of price and yield insurance. After reviewing several revenue insurance experiences, an application is developed to compare various policies that include the actual production aid, tree aid, yield insurance and revenue insurance. The comparison is made taking into account the efficacy of public expenditure’s efficiency and the risk reduction potential. Results do not back the assertion that a revenue insurance scheme would be a superior policy than the current policy, that includes a production aid and yield insurance. It is shown that revenue insurance requires less reinsurance protection than yield insurance, making it cheaper on relative terms. Lastly, the analyses at provincial level show that the results of each studied policy are sharply different based on the risks and productivity that characterise each province.