Social Resilience in Spain in a Comparative Framework

Abstract

Resilience is the ability of organisms to resist adversity and recover to continue their development. Intuitively it could be argued that unemployment, inequality and poverty subject Spain to a very high degree of resilience, given that the figures for these sub-indicators are very high when compared with neighbouring countries. To compare the degree of resilience in Spain in an international framework, a comparative composite and hierarchical resilience index of K means is constructed with importance coefficients and equitable weighting using thirteen basic variables for eight European Union countries over a time interval of eleven years.