Earthquake Risk and Earthquake Catastrophe Insurance for the People's Republic of China

The year 2008 witnessed the renewed interests in earthquake risk management and insurance in the People's Republic of China (PRC), after the Wenchuan earthquake hit the country in May. Located along the southeastern edge of the Euro-Asian Plate, the PRC has a relatively high seismicity, which is manifested by the frequent occurrence of large and disastrous earthquakes. Buildings and infrastructure in the earthquake-prone regions of the PRC have relatively low earthquake resistance levels. Hence, disastrous earthquakes result not only in large numbers of injuries and fatalities but also in huge economic losses from property damages. While the PRC began testing earthquake insurance programs in the late 1980s, the overall penetration rate remains very low. The low penetration rate not only creates disruptions for the government after a major earthquake but also, in some cases, delays the reconstruction efforts. Moreover, as a result of the low penetration of earthquake insurance in the PRC, the government serves as the predominant bearer of financial risk from earthquake catastrophes. This paper discusses historical earthquakes and earthquake risk in the PRC and the recent developments of PRC's earthquake risk reduction efforts. The general principles of earthquake programs are explained and the critical issues of formulating earthquake programs in the PRC are discussed, including lessons from earthquake insurance in other countries and other catastrophe insurance in the PRC, data issues, loss risk modeling issues, financial risk modeling issues, legislative issues, and public awareness issues. The paper concludes with several policy directions that the Asian Development Bank can take to help the PRC in its design and implementation of earthquake insurance.earthquake insurance; China; earthquake risk; Wenchuan earthquake; catastrophe insurance

EMERGING LEADERSHIP MODELS: IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC POLICY EDUCATION

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 323)

This bibliography lists 125 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during April, 1989. Subject coverage includes; aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

ECONOMIC AGENCY THROUGH MODULARITY THEORY

Economic agency as a matter of rational decision-making and as a problem of bounded rationality has never gone too far from its earlier formalization in the 1950s. Not that the advancement on this topic is so slow, but the same problem concerning higher level cognition as another general program of cognitive science is not as easy as behavioral studies. This paper will show a parallelism between economic agency and folkpsychological perspective, and in turn will give a short description on how folk psychology is unseparable from modularity theory. In short, then there must be a way to cope with cognition as the black box of economics if we can identify the appropriate level of description of cognitive structure, i.e.: modularity theory.bounded rationality, folk psychology, modularity theory

The Declining Share of Agricultural Employment in the People\u27s Republic of China: How Fast?

From 1962 to 2013, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) agricultural employment share declined from 82% to 31%. The transfer of workers out of low-productivity agriculture is a fundamental pillar of the PRC’s aspirations to progress and eventually become a high-income economy. We hypothesize that the drivers of this decline have been the increase in income per capita, industrial value added, foreign direct investment, and domestic credit. We use an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model to test the strong exogeneity of the regressors so that we can use it for forecasting. Results indicate that the share of employment in agriculture in the PRC will decline to about 24% by 2020, the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020). We also estimate that the PRC’s employment share will reach 5%, the share observed in today’s rich economies, by 2042–2048

Urban and river flooding: Comparison of flood risk management approaches in the UK and China and an assessment of future knowledge needs

Increased urbanisation, economic growth, and long-term climate variability have made both the UK and China more susceptible to urban and river flooding, putting people and property at increased risk. This paper presents a review of the current flooding challenges that are affecting the UK and China and the actions that each country is undertaking to tackle these problems. Particular emphases in this paper are laid on (1) learning from previous flooding events in the UK and China, and (2) which management methodologies are commonly used to reduce flood risk. The paper concludes with a strategic research plan suggested by the authors, together with proposed ways to overcome identified knowledge gaps in flood management. Recommendations briefly comprise the engagement of all stakeholders to ensure a proactive approach to land use planning, early warning systems, and water-sensitive urban design or redesign through more effective policy, multi-level flood models, and data driven models of water quantity and quality