ABSTRACT
The concept of economic security has two dimensions-security at the level of the household or citizen and security at the level of the state. The path of international development is not smooth, and it is regularly punctuated by local, and sometimes global, setbacks. In past decade there been proliferation of composite indices covering almost all aspects of economics, the environment and the social sciences, and the question of economic vulnerability has not escaped this trend. Among the more famous are the United Nations Committee for Development Policy's Human Development Index and the World Bank's Governance Indicators. In the Common wealth Family, a Small Island Developing States (SIDS) meeting held in 1990 under the auspices of UNCTAD triggered the first serious efforts towards developing a vulnerability index. Resilience as a concept has been taken to embrace two associated issues, namely the ability to withstand an exogenous shock should one occur, and the ability to respond to a crisis should it develop.
