Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...

The standard method of testing for efficient risk-sharing in village economies does not allow one to identify vulnerable households, only to make statements about the average risk in the village, or of sub-groups identifiable on the basis of observables. Here, by working directly with...