Vulnerability to individual and aggregate poverty

Cesar Calvo and Stefan Dercon

Social Choice and Welfare, 2013, vol. 41, issue 4, 740 pages

Abstract: We propose families of measures for vulnerability to both individual and aggregate poverty. We view vulnerability as the burden caused by the threat of poverty. Exposure to states of the world where hardship may strike causes distress ex-ante, even if ex-post the dice are benign and poverty (consumption below a critical norm) does not materialise. We ensure our measures meet a set of desirable axioms—in the case of aggregate vulnerability, this set includes sensitivity to the degree of correlation of outcomes across individuals. We argue that individual vulnerability levels are not enough to compose the aggregate picture, e.g. because society may be wary of the threat of simultaneous, widespread poverty. We illustrate with data from Ethiopia, where rainfall risks are found to raise vulnerability to poverty despite sustained increases in consumption. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-012-0706-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:41:y:2013:i:4:p:721-740

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-012-0706-y

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().