Vulnerabilità e benessere delle famiglie italiane

The sharp rise in interest rates on loans and the concurrent phase of stagnation/recession created wide scale financial and economic difficulties for Italian households. These difficulties have raised questions as to the risk Italian households face of not being able to face the financial and economic needs of everyday life and/or loan commitments contracted with banks or other types of lenders. We conducted a survey with the aim: i) to create an index to measure households’ financial vulnerability that can be used to monitor developments in the phenomenon over time; ii) to create a panel of Italian households for periodic studies of the conditions of financial vulnerability; iii) to analyse the determinants of financial vulnerability; iv) to investigate the socio-demographic, economic and behavioural characteristics of groups of homogeneous individuals by degree of financial vulnerability. The innovative feature of this work is the creation of an indicator of financial vulnerability aimed at synthesizing different profiles of household financial instability