The measurement of resilience

Résumé

We provide an axiomatic approach to the measurement of individual resilience. Resilience has been an increasingly important topic in many social sciences and policy circles but, as of now, there does not seem to be much literature on its theoretical foundations. This paper is intended to fill that gap. After an introduction to the notion of resilience and its possible determinants, we introduce a set of intuitively appealing properties that a resilience measure is required to possess. Our result is a characterization of the specific resilience ordering that satisfies these axioms.