Assessing vulnerability

The views expressed in this paper are the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), or its Board of Directors or the governments they represent. ADB makes no representation concerning and does not guarantee the source, originality, accuracy, completeness or reliability of any statement, information, data, finding, interpretation, advice, opinion, or view presented. Executive summary This paper has presented a framework to describe and analyse poverty, risk and vulnerability. It has discussed the possibilities to measure vulnerability to poverty, with an emphasis on quantitative techniques. Finally, it has discussed some of the recent challenges and issues related to a policy to reduce vulnerability. Although some of the analytical methods described are in their infancy and the data requirement are high and currently not met, it is important to bring some of these issues higher on the policy agenda, including when assisting and contributing to the design of poverty reduction strategies, such as in the context of PRSPs and other key policy declarations. One important reason is that vulnerability and risk is increasingly shown not to be just another dimension of poverty; it is also a cause of poverty and destitution. I have argued that expanding quantitative data collection and research is going to be especially helpful, if only to provide a clearer focus in policy discussions. Little is currently known about the size, frequency and relative importance of different risks faced by households and individuals across the developing world. More should be known about the ability of individuals, households and communities to cope with events and shocks, as well as with fluctuations such as seasonality. Bringing this into the discussion, e.g. in the form of vulnerability profiles similar to the standard quantitative poverty profiles, could be very helpful. Vulnerability must be defined relative to some benchmark. The natural benchmark would be vulnerability to poverty. Poverty should be considered in its various dimensions. Vulnerability to one dimension does not necessarily mean vulnerability to another. The lack of a 'single' dimension for discussion should not be a problem, even in quantitative work. It is perfectly feasible to discuss in quantitative work vulnerability to poor education, to poor health and to income poverty as separate dimensions of vulnerability to poverty. Vulnerability is also forward-looking: it makes a statement about future poverty. Vulnerability is then defined as ex-ante poverty, i.e. before one …