This book presents essential advances in analytical frameworks and tools for modeling the spatial and economic impacts of disasters. In the wake of natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti Earthquake, and the East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, as well as major terrorist attacks, the book analyzes disaster impacts from various perspectives, including resilience, space-time extensions, and decision-making strategies, in order to better understand how and to what extent these events impact economies and societies around the world. The contributing authors are internationally recognized experts from various disciplines, such as economics, geography, planning, regional science, civil engineering, and risk management. Thanks to the insights they provide, the book will benefit not only researchers in these and related fields, but also graduate students, disaster management professionals, and other decision-makers.

Evaluating the myriad dimensions of how disasters can affect economic activity and decision-making, this cutting-edge Handbook presents a timely analysis of the conditions that reduce or exacerbate disaster impacts. Addressing developments in research on disaster economics, internationally recognized scholars combine theoretical considerations with empirical methods to expand and improve the field of disaster mitigation.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Barclay G. Jones, Professor of City and Regional Planning and Regional Science at Cornell University. Over a decade ago, Barclay took on a fledgling area of study - economic modeling of disasters - and nurtured its early development. He served as the social science program director at the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (NCEER), a university consortium sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency of the United States. In this capacity, Barclay shepherded and attracted a number of regional scientists to the study of disasters. He organized a conference, held in the ill-fated World Trade Center in September 1995, on "The Economic Consequences of Earthquakes: Preparing for the Unexpected. " He persistently advocated the importance of social science research in an establishment dominated by less-than-sympathetic natural scientists and engineers. In 1993, Barclay organized the first of a series of sessions on "Measuring Regional Economic Effects of Unscheduled Events" at the North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI). This unusual nomenclature brought attention to the challenge that disasters -largely unanticipated, often sudden, and always disorderly - pose to the regional science modeling tradition. The sessions provided an annual forum for a growing coalition of researchers, where previously the literature had been fragmentary, scattered, and episodic. Since Barclay's unexpected passing in 1997, we have continued this effort in his tradition.

This book outlines methodologies to estimate the economic impacts of natural disasters based on business surveys conducted after large disasters in Japan. By including numerous observations on business activities in past disasters and the validations of both engineering and economic models based on these data sets, this book appeals to practitioners who estimate the regional economic impacts as well as to students and young professionals in various fields who conduct disaster impact studies. The book consists of 7 chapters and includes theories and practices, which help readers to interlink the estimation methods with real-world problems. The study primarily focuses on cases in Japan, but the methods employed can be generalized and applied in other countries.

Featuring a stellar international cast list of leading and cutting-edge scholars, The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of the Environment presents the state of the art of the discipline that considers ecological issues and crises from a political economy perspective. This collective volume sheds new light on the effect of economic and power inequality on environmental dynamics and, conversely, on the economic and social impact of environmental dynamics. The chapters gathered in this handbook make four original contributions to the field of political economy of the environment. First, they revisit essential concepts and methods of environmental economics in the light of their political economy. Second, they introduce readers to recent theoretical and empirical advances in key issues of political economy of the environment with a special focus on the relationship between inequality and environmental degradation, a nexus that has dramatically come into focus with the COVID crisis. Third, the authors of this handbook open the field to its critical global and regional dimensions: global issues, such as the environmental justice movement and inequality and climate change as well as regional issues such as agriculture systems, air pollution, natural resources appropriation and urban sustainability. Fourth and finally, the work shows how novel analysis can translate into new forms of public policy that require institutional reform and new policy tools. Ecosystems preservation, international climate negotiations and climate mitigation policies all have a strong distributional dimension that chapters point to. Pressing environmental policy such as carbon pricing and low-carbon and energy transitions entail numerous social issues that also need to be accounted for with new analytical and technological tools. This handbook will be an invaluable reference, research and teaching tool for anyone interested in political economy approaches to environmental issues and ecological crises.

This book is part of a six-volume series on Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience. The series aims to fill in gaps in theory and practice in the Sendai Framework and provides additional resources, methodologies, and communication strategies to enhance the plan for action and targets proposed by the Sendai Framework. The series will appeal to a broad range of researchers, academics, students, policy makers, and practitioners in engineering, environmental science, geography, geoscience, emergency management, finance, community adaptation, atmospheric science and information technology. This volume provides a holistic approach to developing disaster risk reduction strategies and policies, exploring the most effective ways to integrate physical and social science aspects of hazard resilience to better inform local populations. This risk-based approach to community resilience development is used to craft a collaborative system for crisis management, and allows for the implementation of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) through social innovation and community engagement to enhance community emergency response support and preparedness. Readers will also learn about education of disaster risk reduction, human health risk assessment, gendered perspectives in disaster response, recovery, and disaster management legislation.

Bank stress tests of climate change risks are relatively new, but are rapidly proliferating. The IMF and World Bank staff collaborated to develop an experimental macro scenario stress testing approach to examine physical risks for banks by building a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model linked to global climate and a catastrophe risk model specifically for the Philippines. Our model shows that the impact of extremely rare typhoons on GDP could already be systemic and worsen substantially with climate change. However, bank capital declines only modestly unless the event is compounded with other disasters, partly thanks to the strength of Philippines’ banks and economy before the COVID crisis. However, more work is needed before drawing strong conclusions about the relevance of climate risk, as the model focused only on typhoons’ physical capital destructions and their macroeconomic-level transmissions to banks.

This ground-breaking Handbook presents a state-of-the-art exploration of entropy, complexity and spatial dynamics from fundamental theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives. It considers how foundational theories can contribute to new advances, including novel modeling and empirical insights at different sectoral, spatial and temporal scales.

The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD

This book presents an evaluation of the impacts of megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis on regional economies and subsequent reconstruction, as well as regional revitalization by the spatial economic model and dynamic macro and regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. The cases examined are the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The study constructs three models of these megathrust earthquakes and the associated tsunami. In the first model, the regional CGE model is proposed with a database comprising the two-regional social accounting matrix for 2005 between the region comprising four disaster-affected prefectures of Japan and the non-disaster region. For the recursive dynamic regional CGE model, the model that expanded and improved the dynamic two-regional CGE model to reflect the incomplete employment conditions and the aging society is used to analyze the impacts of an earthquake and the construction of industrial clusters. In the second model, the interregional input–output model is proposed in order to analyze the impacts of the earthquake and rapid population decline and construction of a biogas electricity power plant. In the third model, a new economic geography (NEG) model is proposed, consisting of the 47 prefectures of Japan in order to investigate the impacts of the Great East Japan and Nankai megathrust earthquakes and the associated tsunami and to consider how they change the regional economies of Japan. Using these three models, the impacts of megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis on regional economies and reconstruction and on regional revitalization are evaluated.