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The purpose of this paper is to examine international experience with multiple-peril crop insurance (MPCI). Named peril crop insurance is available in most countries but MPCI is less common. While named peril insurance is widely successful, MPCI has a checkered history. In most cases, MPCI actuarial experience has been poor and large premium subsidies have been required to incentivize purchasing.

International experience with MPCI is reviewed with a particular focus on the USA which has the largest MPCI program in the world. Rationales for government involvement in facilitating MPCI offers are examined and future challenges are explored.

In most cases, MPCI actuarial experience has been poor and large premium subsidies have been required to incentivize purchasing. MPCI purchasing has increased dramatically in recent years but so have government expenditures to support MPCI programs. Significant challenges remain with providing cost-effective MPCI coverage for crop farmers.

While previous articles have reviewed MPCI in the USA, this paper also considers experiences in other countries. Future challenges and research needs are described.

While significant progress in microcredit and microfinance has been made in low‐income countries, lending for small farming enterprises has been limited. This article reviews how innovative index‐based risk‐transfer products (IBRTPs) can be used to transfer the correlated natural disaster risks that often hamper the development of farm‐level microcredit. By linking lending to IBRTPs, access to microcredit can be enhanced while also providing opportunities to offer mutual sharing of the basis risk that remains after correlated risks are transferred into global markets. This opens the way for new thinking about developing agricultural insurance in low‐income countries.

This article considers the potential for securitizing index‐based insurance products that transfer weather and natural disaster risks from lower income countries. It begins with a brief overview explaining why markets for natural disaster risks are important, yet often missing, in lower income countries and a review of some recent activities using index‐based weather insurance. Next, we describe how natural disaster risks are handled in higher income countries. These examples, along with the example of an innovative index‐based livestock insurance pilot project in Mongolia, illustrate how layers, or tranches, of natural disaster risk can be financed during the product development phase by creating structures similar to the Special Purpose Vehicles used in catastrophe bond, mortgage bond, and the emerging microfinance bond markets. We refer to these investment alternatives as micro‐CAT bonds since the principle amounts would be small relative to the existing CAT bond market.

The purpose of this article is to build a framework for thinking about radical program redesign as a broad, forward‐looking, sustainable institutional change process rather than a traditionally narrow, periodic “project” aimed primarily at comparisons with past performance. The paper seeks to examine the transformational journey of a US public research university's AACSB‐accredited business school during its efforts to reinvent itself for the long term after decades of unsatisfactory continuous improvement initiatives. The key success factor is developing more of a learning‐oriented culture to enable ongoing performance monitoring and corresponding variations in strategies, structure, and action.

The paper takes the form of a qualitative case study.

Initiating radical change in educational institutions requires some type of crisis without which there is a remarkable deficiency in faculty members' motivation to learn. Once awakened by compelling data that disconfirm their illusions of effectiveness, a critical mass of faculty members can readily lead cultural and structural changes that enable ongoing advances in their programs and colleges. Sustainable planned change depends on a culture of disciplined commitment to data, information, and knowledge that are effectively communicated by the principal change agent and swiftly translated into new, appropriate action.

This is a single case study of a US business school whose cultural and political nuances may differ from non‐US educational institutions, thereby limiting the value of the learning process and outcomes that are reported. In addition, the paper describes and explains a relatively short‐term four‐year change process whose assessment would no doubt benefit from a seven to eight‐year retrospective analysis.

The paper illuminates many of the commonly observed cultural and political dynamics in educational institutions that both promoted and inhibited the faculty's progress during the redesign, and considers the faculty's future path based on perceptions about the challenges that emerged from its recent transformation. Other business school faculty can distil insight from the report to guide their own journeying.

This is one of a very small number of theoretically grounded reports of a graduate faculty's efforts to redesign its MBA program for a creative, good fit with twenty‐first century global economic realities. More and more business schools are starting to move in a similar direction to this and their faculties could gain a great deal from the experience reported here.