fluctuations, especially those affecting the more deprived groups such as the poor and the near poor (box 1.3). This Report does not propose a new measure of human vulnerability. Policies to reduce vulnerability require going beyond
averages to gauge how secure the benefits are and how well they are distributed and to measure how poverty and deprivation are declining, whether there are enough decent jobs and whether social protections are adequate to
BOX 1.3 Measuring vulnerability The past 40 years have seen considerable work on measuring vulnerability. Researchers have proposed measuring several types of vulnerability, many covered in this Report. Some work has focused on specific vulnerabilities: to natural disasters, to income poverty or to food price volatility. Others take a broader systemic approach to assess the vulnerability of an economy or environment to shocks. But little has been done to assess the vulnerability and sustainability of human development achievements. Much of the early work on vulnerability focused on natural disasters in the 1970s. A landmark study showed that the incidence of natural disasters and fatalities was increasing and that the burden of death fell disproportionately on developing countries.1 One of the authors developed the concept of vulnerability as both external (exposure to risks) and internal (people’s capacity to cope).2 More recent frameworks, such as the World Risk Report, have added a third component, adaptation (capacities for long-term societal change).3 Whereas poverty can be directly observed, vulnerability cannot: it is essentially a measure of what might happen in the future. Measuring vulnerability to poverty is generally aimed at the likely sources of vulnerability and who is vulnerable. A study in Ethiopia, for example, examined the impact and potential interactions of health, education and consumption among the poor, finding that those with both chronic undernutrition and illiteracy are more vulnerable to poverty and more like to stay longer in deep poverty.4 The United Nations Development Programme’s Macroeconomic Vulnerability Assessment Framework assesses a country’s capacity to cope with a crisis in the short term and to identify policy areas that need to be strengthened to build longer term resilience.5 It considers the sources and transmission channels of vulnerability as well as coping mechanisms. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Food Security Index, which measures vulnerability to hunger, comprises measures of affordability, availability, quality and safety. Some 870 million people globally have no secure source of food: That number is not changing rapidly, with an average of just 2.5 million people a year emerging from food insecurity.6 The Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index assesses states’ vulnerability to conflict and aggregates 22 indicators of violence or the absence of violence in a society. A sibling measure, the Positive Peace Index, measures national attitudes, institutions and structures to determine their capacity to create and maintain a peaceful society.7 Broader approaches include work that seeks to assess environmental and economic vulnerability. The Secretariat of the Pacific Community, for example, developed the Environmental Vulnerability Index, which comprises three pillars: hazard (such as extreme climatic events), resistance (such as land area) and damage (such as endangered species).8
The United Nations uses economic vulnerability in defining the least developed countries: low-income countries “suffering from structural impediments to sustainable development . . . manifested in a low level of human resource development and a high level of structural economic vulnerability.” It uses a structural economic vulnerability index to reflect the risk posed by shocks along with gross national income per capita and a human assets index. The economic vulnerability index includes indicators of shocks (natural and external), such as the instability of exports and agricultural production and victims of natural disasters, alongside measures of exposure to shocks, such as the share of population in low coastal zones. It highlights the high vulnerability of the least developed countries and small island developing states and shows that vulnerability is decreasing more slowly in least developed countries than in other developing countries.9 Considering a society’s overall vulnerability to loss of human development or well-being is more challenging still. Experimental work by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defined vulnerability to future loss of well-being when people lack “assets which are crucial for resilience to risks.” It proposed a set of indicators to assess a society’s vulnerability based on access to different types of capital: economic (poverty), human (education) and social capital (support networks) as well as collective assets, such as essential services.10 These approaches, though different, have some ideas in common. First, overall risk is defined by the interaction of the chance of something happening (exposure) and its likely impact if it does (vulnerability). Second, the analysis and measurement of vulnerability are more tractable when looking separately at exposure to risk and ability to cope or adapt. Third, vulnerability is itself a multidimensional concept that can include measures of people’s capacity both to cope (in terms of skills, assets or capabilities) and to adapt over the longer term. These approaches all take a narrower perspective on vulnerability than is used in this Report and generally measure vulnerability to a particular type of threat (economic shocks, hunger, natural disasters). So they may be useful in providing partial measures of vulnerability, but they do not assess the broad systemic vulnerability that is the focus of this Report. Nor do they shed very much light on the ways the very systems themselves can generate vulnerability. There is clearly a lot more thinking to be done and much to be learned from existing work. This Report does not propose new measures, preferring instead to focus on embedding vulnerability firmly within the human development approach, which might then pave the way for new measurement work.
Notes 1. O’Keefe, Westgate Wisner 1976. 2. Wisner and others 2004. 3. Alliance Development Works 2012. 4. Kwak and Smith 2011. 5. UNDP 2011d. 6. See http://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com. 7. See http://economicsandpeace.org/ research/iep-indices-data/global-peace-index. 8. See www.sopac.org/index.php/environmental-vulnerability-index. 9. UNDESA 2013a. 10. Morrone and others 2011.
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