Has Risk Sharing Increased in Asia (and Elsewhere)?

An interpretative survey with four answers: (i) consumption risk sharing seems to have increased among industrialized countries but much less in the emerging world; (ii) the increase in risk sharing is generally found to be stronger in studies that focus on trends rather than on purely cyclical variation in the data; (iii) globalization has not only affected consumption responses to output shocks but also the structure of these shocks themselves, which in turn has affected the measurement of risk sharing; (iv) taking stock of (ii) and (iii), I show that risk sharing in East Asia started to increase once the region had recovered from the Asian crisis of the late 1990s.