Question

Vulnerability is an important measure of poverty. Explain

Answer 1

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The Concept of Vulnerability to Poverty
The adjective ‘vulnerable’ and the noun ‘vulnerability’ are widely used in various areas of knowledge, including medicine (e.g. Flaskerud and Winslow, 1998; Delor and Hubert, 2000), natural disaster risk management (e.g. Wisner, 1993; Blaikie et al., 1994; Weichselgartner, 2001; Levine, 2004; Alexander, 2012), criminology (e.g. Killias and Clerici, 2000; Daniel, 2010), political science (e.g. Thompson, 1975) and psychology (e.g. Flouri et al., 2010).

In a general context, vulnerability can be understood as a state of defencelessness against adverse shock that could inflict damage to an agent or system (person, household, economy, financial system, climate system, etc.). Consequently, a state of vulnerability can be characterized either by the presence of certain weaknesses or internal conditions inherent to the agent or system in question (which determine their state of defencelessness), or by the presence of certain probable external shocks, to which the agent or system does not have the ability to cope.

In the context of poverty analysis, vulnerable individuals are those who are exposed to poverty, either because they possess some structural characteristics that determine a low consumption or because they are unable to cope with the risk of becoming poor. This basic insight can be summarized in the following definition, which is commonly explicit in several seminal works on vulnerability (Chaudhuri et al., 2002, p. 4; Christiansen and Subbarao, 2005, p. 522) and is also implicit in the research literature on vulnerability as exposure to poverty (see, e.g. Christiaensen and Boisvert, 2000; Pritchett, et al. 2000; Ligon and Schechter, 2003; Calvo, 2005, 2007, 2013; Chiwaula et al., 2011; Gallardo, 2013; Günther and Maier, 2014):