Social and Material Vulnerability of the Italian Municipalities: Comparing Alternative Approaches

In this paper, we address the measurement of vulnerability at municipality level, by using novel non-aggregative tools for the construction of synthetic indicators and for the extraction of rankings, based on the theory of partially ordered sets. We compare the results of the non-aggregative procedure to those provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, through the Index of Social and Material Vulnerability (applied to 2011 census data) and show that, although the overall pictures rendered by the two approaches are very similar, they are not equivalent, some local areas being resolved and some municipalities being ranked differently. The synthetic vulnerability scores are complemented with a measure of the degree of diversity of the vulnerability patterns, to give a more faithful picture of the complexity of the phenomenon and provide policy-makers with a more realistic view on it.