Assessing and measuring economic resilience in low-income countries

: illustrative cases Nepal and DR Congo

Abstract

Considering two countries that are the subject of a comparative study (DR Congo and Nepal), we have defined a number of criteria on the basis of which eighteen indicators divided into five dimensions (commercial, socio-economic, fiscal, financial and spherical) have proved important for measuring and assessing the economic resilience of low-income countries. The min-max standardization technique allowed us to derive standardized coefficients between 0 and 1 on the basis of which we performed arithmetic average operations in order to identify sub-indices related to each dimension. Thus, five sub-indices were determined and their geometric average allowed us to determine the economic resilience index. Also, the min-max technique as well as the principal component analysis allowed us to determine the dimension that contributes more to the variability of our data. At the end of our analyses, it turns out that the economy of Nepal over the period from 2003 to 2017 is more resilient than that of DR Congo. This resilience capacity is largely explained by the trade dimension for these two countries.

Date of Award	31 May 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Marie Van Overbeke (Supervisor) & Francois Woitrin (Co-Supervisor)