Vulnerability to Poverty

de M. Grimm, H. Waibel, Stephan Klasen

While absolute poverty in emerging economies has been falling substantially in recent years, persistent risks and shocks, ranging from macro shocks such as high food prices to micro shocks such as drought or harvest failure, have left millions of people in a perpetual state of vulnerability to poverty. As a consequence, development policies in emerging economies are increasingly moving from fighting current poverty to reducing such future vulnerability to poverty. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of measurement, determinants and policy implications of vulnerability to poverty. It provides new approaches to the conceptualization and measurement of vulnerability to poverty based on custom-made panel data for Thailand and Vietnam and analyses in detail how risks and shocks affect the vulnerability of households in these two economies. In addition, it analyses the determinants of vulnerability and household coping strategies to deal with shocks and to reduce future risks. It also derives policy implications to reduce vulnerability to poverty and examines the impact of policies.