A household’s observed poverty level is an ex-post measure of a household’s well-being (or lack thereof). But poverty is a stochastic phenomenon and the current poverty level of a household, may not necessarily be a good guide to the household’s expected poverty in the future. For thinking about appropriate forward-looking anti-poverty interventions (i.e., interventions that aim to go beyond the alleviation of current poverty to prevent or reduce future poverty), the critical need then is to go beyond a cataloging of who is currently poor and who is not, to an assessment of households’
vulnerability to poverty. In this paper, we make the case for broadening the scope of poverty assessments to take account of vulnerability to poverty and outline a conceptual and empirical approach for doing so. The paper has two broad aims: first, to provide a conceptual and methodological overview of the uses and empirical implementation of vulnerability assessments using household-level data; and second, to demonstrate, through a number of illustrative
examples as well as two more detailed country studies, how the general methodological approach can be usefully applied and tailored to particular contexts and data, to yield policy-relevant insights about the nature and extent of vulnerability.