Methods for microeconometric risk and vulnerability assessments
This “toolkit” provides quantitative tools to practitioners who want to undertake risk and vulnerability assessments using household data. While one could use price, exchange rate, and balance of payments data to examine macroeconomic shocks, and rainfall data to
assess the severity of droughts and floods, we are ultimately interested in their impacts on households—thus the emphasis on household data.
It is divided into four principal sections: Section 2 provides a conceptual framework that links risk, risk management and vulnerability. Section 3 builds on this discussion to describe techniques for measuring vulnerability within a population. Section 4 discusses econometric issues associated with their implementation. Building on these discussions, section 5 focuses on four questions: (1) Who is vulnerable? (2) What are the sources of vulnerability? (3) How do households cope with risk and vulnerability? and (4) What is the gap between risks and risk management mechanisms? Section 6 concludes by presenting guidelines for practitioners undertaking risk and vulnerability assessments.