Author details
Available document(s)
Sorted by (Issue date descending, Date of update descending, Date of creation descending, Number of collection descending) Add the result to your favourites Refine your search
An exploration of the link between development, economic growth, and natural risk
This paper investigates the link between development, economic growth, and the economic losses from natural disasters in a general analytical framework, with an application to hurricane flood risks in New Orleans. It concludes that where capital accumulates through increased density of capital at risk in a given area, and the costs of protection therefore increase more slowly than capital at risk, (i) protection improves over time and the probability of disaster occurrence decreases; (ii) capital at risk -- and thus economic losses in case of disaster -- increases faster than economic growth; ...
![]()
Investment decision making under deep uncertainty - application to climate change
While agreeing on the choice of an optimal investment decision is already difficult for any diverse group of actors, priorities, and world views, the presence of deep uncertainties further challenges the decision-making framework by questioning the robustness of all purportedly optimal solutions. This paper summarizes the additional uncertainty that is created by climate change, and reviews the tools that are available to project climate change (including downscaling techniques) and to assess and quantify the corresponding uncertainty. Assuming that climate change and other deep uncertainties ...
![]()
A cost effective solution to reduce disaster losses in developing countries : hydro-meteorological services, early warning, and evacuation
In Europe, it can be estimated that hydro-meteorological information and early warning systems save several hundreds of lives per year, avoid between 460 million and 2.7 billion Euros of disaster asset losses per year, and produce between 3.4 and 34 billion of additional benefits per year through the optimization of economic production in weather-sensitive sectors (agriculture, energy, etc.). The potential for similar benefits in the developing world is not only proportional to population, but also to increased hazard risk due to climate and geography, as well as increased exposure to weather ...
![]()
Modeling the roles of heterogeneity, substitution, and inventories in the assessment of natural disaster economic costs
Based on an IO structure, the ARIO-inventory model simulates the economic consequences and responses to a natural disaster. It represents explicitly production bottlenecks, models a flexibility in production capacity in case of scarcity, and introduces inventories as an additional flexibility in the production system. Moreover, it takes into account the heterogeneity in goods and services within sectors, and the consequences on production bottlenecks and substitution possibilities. The model is applied to the landfall of hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Sensitivity analyses show that results ar ...
![]()
How economic growth and rational decisions can make disaster losses grow faster than wealth
Hallegatte Stéphane - World Bank, 2011Assuming that capital productivity is higher in areas at risk from natural hazards (such as coastal zones or flood plains), this paper shows that rapid development in these areas—and the resulting increase in disaster losses—may be the consequence of a rational and well-informed trade-off between lower disaster losses and higher productivity. With disasters possibly becoming less frequent but increasingly destructive in the future, average disaster losses may grow faster than wealth. Myopic expectations, lack of information, moral hazard, and externalities reinforce the likelihood of this scen ...
![]()
Policy Research Working Paper, 5617. How economic growth and rational decisions can make disaster losses grow faster than wealth
Assuming that capital productivity is higher in areas at risk from natural hazards (such as coastal zones or flood plains), this paper shows that rapid development in these areas -- and the resulting increase in disaster losses -- may be the consequence of a rational and well-informed trade-off between lower disaster losses and higher productivity. With disasters possibly becoming less frequent but increasingly destructive in the future, average disaster losses may grow faster than wealth. Myopic expectations, lack of information, moral hazard, and externalities reinforce the likelihood of thi ...
Add tag 
