The data chase : what's out there on trade costs and nontariff barriers ?

Trade costs and nontariff barriers are at the forefront of discussions on competitiveness and expanding trade opportunities for developing countries. This paper provides a summary overview of data and indicators relevant to these issues and has been informed by work underway at the World Bank on trade facilitation over the past several years to catalogue data sets and indicators. Although there has been progress in expanding data sets and developing policy-relevant indicators on trade costs and barriers, much more is needed. In order to assess progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, evaluating the impact of development projects, and whether meeting Aid for Trade goals will be met, for example, a dedicated and expansive new effort to collect and assess data is needed. This paper attempts to highlight gaps in data on trade costs and provides insight into the type of new data that might be developed in the future.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Law,Free Trade,Trade Policy

General Report - Session 3

This General Report summarizes the 84 papers accepted for the Session 3 focused on: - 3a. Case Histories on Failure and Remediation of Slopes, Dams, Embankments and Landfills (53 papers), - 3b. Case Histories on Failure and Remediation of Retaining Structures, Slurry Walls, and Deep Excavations, Dewatering, Stability (27 papers), - 3c. Improving the Stability and Maintenance of Monuments (4 papers). The papers originate from 26 countries (11 European countries, 3 American countries, 11 Asian countries and 1 African country). The papers cover a number of relevant topics divided into three different sub - sessions. As for the two papers included in Session 3c, only one deals with maintenance and retrofit of historical monuments. Indeed paper 3.03c is more pertinent to session 3b. On the other hand some papers included in Session 3a could also be considered in Session 3b and vice versa

Seismic Risk Analysis of Revenue Losses, Gross Regional Product and transportation systems.

Natural threats like earthquakes, hurricanes or tsunamis have shown seri- ous impacts on communities. In the past, major earthquakes in the United States like Loma Prieta 1989, Northridge 1994, or recent events in Italy like L’Aquila 2009 or Emilia 2012 earthquake emphasized the importance of pre- paredness and awareness to reduce social impacts. Earthquakes impacted businesses and dramatically reduced the gross regional product. Seismic Hazard is traditionally assessed using Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Anal- ysis (PSHA). PSHA well represents the hazard at a specific location, but it’s unsatisfactory for spatially distributed systems. Scenario earthquakes overcome the problem representing the actual distribution of shaking over a spatially distributed system. The performance of distributed productive systems during the recovery process needs to be explored. Scenario earthquakes have been used to assess the risk in bridge networks and the social losses in terms of gross regional product reduction. The proposed method for scenario earthquakes has been applied to a real case study: Treviso, a city in the North East of Italy. The proposed method for scenario earthquakes requires three models: one representation of the sources (Italian Seismogenic Zonation 9), one attenuation relationship (Sa- betta and Pugliese 1996) and a model of the occurrence rate of magnitudes (Gutenberg Richter). A methodology has been proposed to reduce thou- sands of scenarios to a subset consistent with the hazard at each location. Earthquake scenarios, along with Mote Carlo method, have been used to simulate business damage. The response of business facilities to earthquake has been obtained from fragility curves for precast industrial building. Fur- thermore, from business damage the reduction of productivity has been simulated using economic data from the National statistical service and a proposed piecewise “loss of functionality model”. To simulate the economic process in the time domain, an innovative businesses recovery function has been proposed. The proposed method has been applied to generate scenarios earthquakes at the location of bridges and business areas. The proposed selection method- ology has been applied to reduce 8000 scenarios to a subset of 60. Subse- quently, these scenario earthquakes have been used to calculate three system performance parameters: the risk in transportation networks, the risk in terms of business damage and the losses of gross regional product. A novel model for business recovery process has been tested. The proposed model has been used to represent the business recovery process and simulate the effects of government aids allocated for reconstruction. The proposed method has efficiently modeled the seismic hazard using scenario earthquakes. The scenario earthquakes presented have been used to assess possible consequences of earthquakes in seismic prone zones and to increase the preparedness. Scenario earthquakes have been used to sim- ulate the effects to economy of the impacted area; a significant Gross Regional Product reduction has been shown, up to 77% with an earthquake with 0.0003 probability of occurrence. The results showed that limited funds available after the disaster can be distributed in a more efficient way

Multi Hazard Scenarios in the Mendoza/San Juan Provinces, Cuyo Region Argentina

This paper exposes major natural hazards inventory encountered in the two San Juan and Mendoza provinces, such as climatic, seismic, gravitational, and social/anthropic ones. The contrast between the high altitude of the region and low one is addressed in order to manage the inhomogeneity of prevention plans. The international road to Chile is greatly affected by gravitational hazards that proceed in out of run period and commercial traffic interruption, and large economic waste more than people vulnerability, as the urban areas are more affected by seismicity scenarios. But as gravitational hazard is affected by the seismicity it is proposed to analyze some co-hazard effect in a multi-scenarios approach from geology geography and mechanical modelling of events to explore the co-effects on the scenarios. Moreover, some similarities with the Rhone-Alpes region of France are evocated and may be of interest.Fil: Daudon, Dominique. University Grenoble Alpes; FranciaFil: Moreiras, Stella Maris. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología y Ciencias Ambientales. Provincia de Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología y Ciencias Ambientales. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología y Ciencias Ambientales; ArgentinaFil: Beck, Elise. University Grenoble Alpes; Franci