ABSTRACT
From 2005 onward, we undertook a series of studies of oil vulnerability in Australian cities that were reported on in working papers and journal articles during 2005-2008. This chapter draws from that work to provide the conceptual and methodological development, along with an example, of a specific approach to examine the distribution of household exposure to higher petrol prices, mortgage interest rate rises and general price inflation due to increases in global oil prices. This approach was originally deployed in Dodson and Sipe (2006), and its foundational work was presented in a subsequent journal paper (Dodson and Sipe 2007). In the 2006 paper, we presented a numerical index that we called the “vulnerability assessment for mortgage, petroleum, and inflation risks and expenditure” (VAMPIRE). It measured the extent of household exposure to the impacts of higher fuel prices and mortgage interest rates, and associated wider inflationary effects on consumer spending power. A version of this work appeared later in the journal Housing Studies (Dodson and Sipe 2008a).
