Structural vulnerability and fragility : an assessment based on composite indicators

Abstract

Vulnerability and fragility are at the heart of the global debate arising from the definition and implementation of the sustainable development goals. This PhD dissertation offers enhanced tools to assess structural vulnerability and fragility from various aspects: economic, social, and environmental. The proposed approach for apprehending these concepts is based on the construction and refinement of composite indicators. It is divided into four chapters.In Chapter 1, we build the retrospective series of the economic vulnerability index (EVI), proposed by the United Nations’ Committee for Development Policy (CDP). Some choices and measures are discussed, such as the methodology used to calculate the instabilities of exports and agricultural production. From our analyses, it appears that the structural economic vulnerability of LDCs is still higher compared to non-LDCs. As well, focusing on the African context, we show that fragile African states are economically more vulnerable than non-fragile African states, and the difference between the two groups of countries seems to come from the difference in the magnitude of shocks. Finally, employing a stochastic dominance approach and using a five-year testing horizon to assess the evolution of the EVI and its main components over time, we observe that there is no real decline of the EVI and its main components at the first order sense. But, an overall decrease can be concluded at the second order sense of dominance.The second chapter focuses on the issue of structural resilience through the Human Assets Index (HAI), another index designed by the UN-CDP for identification of LDCs. We start with a presentation of retrospective series of the HAI and its components, for which, to a limited extend, we have used econometric tools to consistently impute missing data. Secondly, we analyze the HAI’s dynamics by assessing the contributions of each component to this. Finally, we debate about the choice of equal we