Establishing a Database for Vulnerability Assessment

Until today there have been few databases that satisfy the theoretical requirements for studying vulnerability to poverty as indicated in Chapter 2. Among existing datasets the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey used, for example, by Dercon et al. (2002; 2005) is prominent and provides a panel dataset well suited to vulnerability analysis. The first wave of data collection was carried out in 1989 in six farming villages in central and southern Ethiopia, with a focus on the crisis and recovery in the 1980s. An expansion of the survey to 15 villages across the country in early 1994 yielded a sample of 1477 households. Additional rounds of the survey were carried out in late 1994, 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2004. In the 1995 wave, a general shock module was implemented, which was further improved in later rounds (Dercon et al., 2005).