Reflecting Disaster Risk in Development Indicators

Disasters triggered by hazards, such as floods, earthquakes, droughts, and cyclones, pose significant impediments to sustainable development efforts in the most vulnerable and exposed countries. Mainstreaming disaster risk is hence seen as an important global agenda as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015-2030. Yet, conventional development indicators remain largely negligent of the potential setbacks that may be posed by disaster risk. This article discusses the need to reflect disaster risk in development indicators and proposes a concept disaster risk-adjusted human development index (RHDI) as an example. Globally available national-level datasets of disaster risk to public and private assets (including health, educational facilities, and private housing) is combined with an estimate of expenditure on health, education, and capital formation to construct an RHDI. The RHDI is then analyzed across various regions and HDI groups, and contrasted with other HDI variants including inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) and the gender-specific female HDI (FHDI) to identify groups of countries where transformational disaster risk reduction (DRR) approaches may be necessary

Family Business Groups and Tunneling Framework : Application and Evidence from Pakistan

In Pakistan there is a ubiquity of firms in which there exists a controlling shareholder, usually in the form of the family. By and large this control is maintained via crossshareholding and inter-locked directorships which in turn is facilitated by the pyramidal organization of these firms. Moreover, these controlling families have often been alleged of tunneling resources from firms in which they have few cash flow rights to ones in which they have more cash flow rights. This paper attempts to quantify the extent of tunneling prevalent in Pakistani family business groups. The framework that is adopted is one that has been presented by Mullainathan et al. (2000) : we use the responses of different firms to performance shocks and map out the flow of resources within a group of firms to quantify the extent to which the marginal rupee is tunneled. We apply this technique to data on Pakistan business groups.Pakistan, tunneling, business groups, crossshareholding

Modeling Growth, Distribution, and the Environment in a Stock-Flow Consistent Framework

Economic policy in the EU faces a trilemma of solving three challenges simultaneously - growth, distribution, and the environment. In order to assess policies that address these issues simultaneously, economic models need to account for both sector-sector and sector-environment feedbacks within a single framework.This paper presents a multi-sectoral stock-flow consistent (SFC) macro model where a demand-driven economy consisting of multiple institutional sectors - firms, energy, households, government, and financial - interacts with the environment. The model is calibrated for the EU region and five policy scenarios are evaluated; low consumption, a capital stock damage function, carbon taxes, higher share of renewable energy, and technological shocks to productivity. Policy outcomes are tracked on overall output, unemployment, income and income distributions, energy, and emission levels. Results show that investment in mitigation technologies allows for absolute decoupling and ensures that the above three issues can be solved simultaneously. (author's abstract)Series: Ecological Economic Paper

Directed Technological Change in a post-Keynesian Ecological Macromodel

This paper presents a post-Keynesian ecological macro model that combines three strands of literature: the directed technological change mechanism developed in mainstream endogenous growth theory models, the ecological economic literature which highlights the role of green innovation and material flows, and the post-Keynesian school which provides a framework to deal with the demand side of the economy, financial flows, and inter- and intra-sectoral behavioral interactions. The model is stock-flow consistent and introduces research and development (R&D) as a component of GDP funded by private firm investment and public expenditure. The economy uses three complimentary inputs - Labor, Capital, and (non-renewable) Resources. Input productivities depend on R&D expenditures, which are determined by relative changes in their respective prices. Two policy experiments are tested; a Resource tax increase, and an increase in the share of public R&D on Resources. Model results show that policy instruments that are continually increased over a long-time horizon have better chances of achieving a "green" transition than one-of climate policy shocks to the system, that primarily have a short-run affect.Series: Ecological Economic Paper

Bayesian Decision Making to Localize Visual Queries in 2D

This report describes our approach for the EGO4D 2023 Visual Query 2D Localization Challenge. Our method aims to reduce the number of False Positives (FP) that occur because of high similarity between the visual crop and the proposed bounding boxes from the baseline's Region Proposal Network (RPN). Our method uses a transformer to determine similarity in higher dimensions which is used as our prior belief. The results are then combined together with the similarity in lower dimensions from the Siamese Head, acting as our measurement, to generate a posterior which is then used to determine the final similarity of the visual crop with the proposed bounding box. Our code is publicly available $\href{https://github.com/s-m-asjad/EGO4D_VQ2D}{here}$.Comment: Report for the EGO4D 2023 Visual Query 2D Localization Challeng

Towards a Stock-Flow Consistent Ecological Macroeconomics. Work Package 205, MS40 "Report on model results including additional policies to counter averse effects"

Modern western economies (in the Eurozone and elsewhere) face a number of challenges over the coming decades. Achieving full employment, meeting climate change and other key environmental targets, and reducing inequality rank amongst the highest of these. The conventional route to achieving these goals has been to pursue economic growth. But this route has created two critical problems for modern economies. The first is that higher growth leads (ceteris parabis) to higher environmental impact. The second is that fragility in financial balances has accompanied relentless demand expansion. The prevailing global response to the first problem has been to encourage a decoupling of output from impacts by investing in green technologies (green growth). But this response runs the risk of exacerbating problems associated with the over-leveraging of households, firms and governments and places undue confidence in unproven and imagined technologies. An alternative approach is to reduce the pace of growth and to restructure economies around green services (post-growth). But the potential dangers of declining growth rates lie in increased inequality and in rising unemployment. Some more fundamental arguments have also been made against the feasibility of interest-bearing debt within a post-growth economy. The work described in this paper was motivated by the need to address these fundamental dilemmas and to inform the debate that has emerged in recent years about the relative merits of green growth and post-growth scenarios. In pursuit of this aim we have developed a suite of macroeconomic models based on the methodology of Post-Keynesian Stock Flow Consistent (SFC) system dynamics. Taken together these models represent the first steps in constructing a new macroeconomic synthesis capable of exploring the economic and financial dimensions of an economy confronting resource or environmental constraints. Such an ecological macroeconomics includes an account of basic macroeconomic variables such as the GDP, consumption, investment, saving, public spending, employment, and productivity. It also accounts for the performance of the economy in terms of financial balances, net lending positions, money supply, distributional equity and financial stability. This report illustrates the utility of this new approach through a number of specific analyses and scenario explorations. These include an assessment of the Piketty hypothesis (that slow growth increases inequality), an analysis of the "growth imperative" hypothesis (that interest bearing debt requires economic growth for stability), and an analysis of the financial and monetary implications of green investment policies. The work also assesses the scope for fiscal policy to improve social and environmental outcomes.Series: WWWforEurop

The risk and consequences of multiple breadbasket failures: an integrated copula and multilayer agent-based modeling approach

Climate shocks to food systems have been thoroughly researched in terms of food security and supply chain management. However, sparse research exists on the dependent nature of climate shocks on food-producing breadbasket regions and their subsequent cascading impacts. In this paper, we propose that a copula approach, combined with a multilayer network and an agent-based model, can give important insights on how tail-dependent shocks can impact food systems. We show how such shocks can potentially cascade within a region through the behavioral interactions of various layers. Based on our suggested framework, we set up a model for India and show that risks due to drought events multiply if tail dependencies during extremes drought is explicitly taken into account. We further demonstrate that the risk is exacerbated if displacement also takes place. In order to quantify the spatial–temporal evolution of climate risks, we introduce a new measure of multilayer vulnerability that we term Vulnerability Rank or VRank. We find that with higher food production losses, the number of agents that are affected increases nonlinearly due to cascading effects in different network layers. These effects spread to the unaffected regions via large-scale displacement causing sudden changes in production, employment and consumption decisions. Thus, demand shifts also force supply-side adjustments of food networks in the months following the climate shock. We suggest that our framework can provide a more accurate picture of food security-related systemic risks caused by multiple breadbasket failures which, in turn, can better inform risk management and humanitarian aid strategies

Bioeconomy Transitions through the Lens of Coupled Social-Ecological Systems: A Framework for Place-Based Responsibility in the Global Resource System

Bioeconomy strategies in high income societies focus at replacing finite, fossil resources by renewable, biological resources to reconcile macro-economic concerns with climate constraints. However, the current bioeconomy is associated with critical levels of environmental degradation. As a potential increase in biological resource use may further threaten the capacity of ecosystems to fulfil human needs, it remains unclear whether bioeconomy transitions in high income countries are sustainable. In order to fill a gap in bioeconomy sustainability assessments, we apply an ontological lens of coupled social-ecological systems to explore critical mechanisms in relation to bioeconomy activities in the global resource system. This contributes to a social-ecological systems (SES)-based understanding of sustainability from a high income country perspective: the capacity of humans to satisfy their needs with strategies that reduce current levels of pressures and impacts on ecosystems. Building on this notion of agency, we develop a framework prototype that captures the systemic relation between individual human needs and collective social outcomes on the one hand (microlevel) and social-ecological impacts in the global resource system on the other hand (macro-level). The BIO-SES framework emphasizes the role of responsible consumption (for physical health), responsible production (to reduce stressors on the environment), and the role of autonomy and selforganisation (to protect the reproduction capacity of social-ecological systems). In particular, the BIO-SES framework can support (1) individual and collective agency in high income country contexts to reduce global resource use and related ecosystem impacts with a bioeconomy strategy, (2) aligning social outcomes, monitoring efforts and governance structures with place-based efforts to achieve the SDGs, as well as (3), advancing the evidence base and social-ecological theory on responsible bioeconomy transitions in the limited biosphere