ABSTRACT

Social vulnerability refers to the inability of some populations, organisations and societies to withstand adverse impacts from multiple stressors to which they are exposed, such as natural hazards. In this paper, we examine the existence of positional concerns (i.e. willingness to incur a loss so as to be above or not to be below others) in social vulnerability that may undermine the strategies and policies aiming at fostering the resilience of socially vulnerable populations. We found that the majority of people express egalitarian preferences, namely, they reject Pareto efficient allocations or gain improvements that benefit more to others than to them because they dislike inequalities. Our results showed that positional concerns are more often expressed than absolute concerns and suggest that policy makers, when tackling the problem of social vulnerability, should take into account citizens’ preferences. We suggest solutions to cope with the problem of positional concerns.

摘要

社会脆弱性是指一些人群、组织和社会无法承受来自自然灾害等多重压力因素的不利影响。在本文中，我们研究了社会脆弱性中存在的位置问题（即愿意承受损失以高于或不低于他人），这可能会破坏旨在培养社会弱势群体复原力的战略和政策。我们发现大多数人表达了平等主义偏好，即他们拒绝帕累托有效分配或获得对他人比对他们更有利的改进，因为他们不喜欢不平等。我们的结果表明，位置问题比绝对问题更常被表达，并表明政策制定者，在解决社会脆弱性问题时，应考虑公民的偏好。我们提出了解决位置问题的解决方案。