People feel economically insecure when they perceive a significant hazard or danger looming in the future, which they are unable to insure against, avoid or ignore. While all OECD countries devote significant resources to mitigate economic insecurity, no consensus exists on the best way to measure it. The paper reviews the pros and cons of the main approaches proposed by the literature and identifies a number of criteria than an ideal measure of economic insecurity should satisfy. It advocates the construction of household level sub-indices for the hazards identified in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (i.e. unemployment, illness, widowhood, disability and old age) and their aggregation to an over-all summary measure of economic insecurity, discussing what could be done with existing data and what additional information should be collected.
