Traditional measures of unemployment were only concerned with the total number of people unemployed. In recent years such measures have come under criticism for ignoring those who may not currently be unemployed but are vulnerable, that is, they live under the risk of becoming unemployed (see Cunningham and Maloney (2000), Glewwe and Hall (1998), Thorbecke (2003)). Alongside this criticism a small but rapidly growing literature is emerging that looks at various aspects of vulnerability and tries to measure it (Amin, Rai, and Topa (2003), Ligon and Schechter (2003), Pritchett, Suryahadi, and Sumarto (2000)).1
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Akerlof, G. A., and Main, B. G. M. (1980). Unemployment spells and unemployment experience. American Economic Review, 70, 885–893
Amin, S., Rai, A. S., and Topa, G. (2003). Does microcredit reach the poor and vulnerable? Evidence from Northern Bangladesh. Journal of Development Economics, 70, 59–82
Atkinson, A. (1970). On the measurement of inequality. Journal of Economic Theory, 2, 244–263
Atkinson, A. (1983). Social justice and public policy. Cambridge, MA: WiMIT Press
Banerjee, A. (2000). The two poverties. Nordic Journal of Political Economy, 26, 129–141
Basu, K., and Foster, J. (1998). On measuring literacy. Economic Journal, 108, 1733–1749
Borooah, V. K. (2002). A duration-sensitive measure of the unemployment rate: Theory and application. Labour, 16, 453–468
Calvo, C., and Dercon, S. (2005). Measuring individual vulnerability (Discussion Paper No. 229). Oxford: Department of Economics, Oxford University
Clark, K. B., and Summers, L. H. (1979). Labor market dynamics and unemployment: A reconsideration. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1979, 13–72
Cunningham, W., and Maloney, W. F. (2000). Measuring vulnerability: Who suffered in the 1995 Mexican crisis? (mimeo). IBRD
Dercon, S. (2005). Vulnerability: A micro perspective. In: Paper presented at the ABCDE Europe conference. Amsterdam, May 2005
Fields, G. S. (1996). The meaning and measurement of income mobility of income mobility. Journal of Economic Theory, 71, 349–377
Foster, J., Greer, J., and Thorbecke, E. (1984). A class of decomposable poverty measures. Econometrica, 52, 761–766
Glewwe, P., and Hall, G. (1998). Are some groups more vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks than others? Hypothesis tests based on panel data from Peru. Journal of Development Economics, 56, 181–206
Grootaert, C., and Kanbur, R. (1995). The lucky few amidst economic decline: Distributional change in Cote d’Ivoire as seen through panel datasets, 1985–1988. Journal of Development Economics, 31, 603–619
Kamanou, G., and Morduch, J. (2002). Vulnerability: A micro perspective (Discussion Paper No. 2002/58). WIDER
Ligon, E., and Schechter, L. (2003). Measuring vulnerability. Economic Journal, 113, C95–C102
Paul, S. (1992). An illfare approach to the measurement of unemployment. Applied Economics, 24, 739–743
Pritchett, L., Suryahadi, A., and Sumarto, S. (2000). Quantifying vulnerability to poverty: A proposed measure, with applications to Indonesia (Working Paper). SMERU
Sen, A. (1974). Informational bases of alternative welfare approaches. Journal of Public Economics, 3, 387–403
Sen, A. (1976). Poverty: An ordinal approach to measurement. Econometrica, 44, 219–231
Sen, A. (1977). On weights and measures: Informational constraints in social welfare analysis. Econometrica, 45, 1539–1572
Sen, A. (1997). The penalties of unemployment (Rome Paper No. 307). San Francisco, CA: Bank of Italy
Shorrocks, A. F. (1978). The measurement of mobility. Econometrica, 46, 1013–1024
Shorrocks, A. F. (1992). Spell incidence, spell duration and the measurement of unemployment (Discussion Paper 409). Essex, UK: Department of Economics, University of Essex
Shorrocks, A. F. (1994). On the measurement of unemployment (Discussion Paper 418). Department of Economics, University of Essex
Suzumura, K. (1999). Consequences, opportunities, and procedures. Social Choice and Welfare, 16, 17–40
Thorbecke, E. (2003). Conceptual and measurement issues in poverty analysis (Paper prepared for the Second Nordic Conference in Development Economics (NCDE-2) Copenhagen). Denmark, June 23–24
World Bank (2002). Pakistan poverty assessment. Poverty in Pakistan: Vulnerabilities, social gaps and rural dynamics (Report No. 24296-PAK). Washington, DC: World Bank
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Basu, K., Nolen, P. (2008). Unemployment and Vulnerability: A Class of Distribution Sensitive Measures, its Axiomatic Properties, and Applications. In: Pattanaik, P.K., Tadenuma, K., Xu, Y., Yoshihara, N. (eds) Rational Choice and Social Welfare. Studies in Choice and Welfare. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79832-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79832-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-79831-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-79832-3
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsEconomics and Finance (R0)