_Defining resilience_ : Resilience has been defined as “...the ability of countries, communities and households to manage change, by maintaining or transforming living standards in the face of shocks or stresses - such as earthquakes, drought or violent conflict - without compromising their long-term prospects” (DFID, 2011; Walker et al. 2004; World Bank, 2013). This definition conceives of resilience not only as the ability of economic agents to return to their previous state, but also as an inclination of these agents to strengthen their adaptive capacity to the post-shock situation.

In recent years, resilience has become more and more attractive as a goal of economic development, because it implies the capacity of economic agents to cope successfully with a wide array of shocks (e.g. environmental, economic, social, political, demographic, religious). Accordingly, the level of vulnerability and the capacity to cope with shocks depend on the nature of the disturbance and the availability of additional resources, such as alternative income, credit capacity, and public assistance. Resilient individuals, communities and households are therefore, seen to be able to meet their food security needs, have access to adequate nutrition, protect their environment, have income and health security, educate their children, and participate in the decisions that affect their lives (Frankenberger et al., 2012). During the last decade, several studies have linked environmental sustainability to concepts of resilience (Morduch, 1993; Mercer, 2010; Bahadur et al., 2010).

_Coping and lack of resilience_ : Although not explicitly stated as resilience, other studies that have analyzed a variety of coping strategies used by households in different countries (e.g. decrease in fertility rates, increase in private borrowing, relying on local support networks, etc.), in an attempt to protect their welfare do come across as measures of lack of resilience. Skoufias (2003) reviewed 12 such studies and also analyzed the interaction between household coping strategies and the impact of crises and natural disasters on different dimensions of well-being. In general, these studies conclude that while the informal efforts put in place by households and/or communities to mitigate and cope with risk were perhaps unavoidable and worked for a few cases, they remained ineffective. Therefore, households were forced to rely on self-insurance strategies that are particularly costly in terms of current as well as future welfare. Such ineffective strategies have been documented across the developing world. Examples include reduction in expenditures, asset sales, and increased private borrowing and debt by Bangladesh households coping with the 1998 floods (Del Ninno et al. (2003)), in Ethiopia (Carter et al., 2006; World Bank, 2005), Southern Zambia (Umetsu, 2010) and Indonesia (Keil et al., 2008). Using about 9,000 farm surveys across Africa, Seo (2010) estimates net revenues associated with different types of farm systems and shows that farmers who moved from a specialized crop farm to an integrated system that mixes crops and livestock are more resilient against climatic shocks.

_Measuring resilience_ : Although a broad literature on resilience exists, there is no consensus yet on how to measure it among the limited set of examples that have attempted to go in that direction The latest contribution is a group of papers that apply a latent variable approach. They propose the idea that resilience is multifaceted and, therefore, not observable per se but can be related to a number of observable context-specific dimensions. These dimensions can be reduced to a single variable, by 4