10 research outputs found
Modeling Policy and Agricultural Decisions in Afghanistan
Afghanistan is responsible for the majority of the world's supply of poppy
crops, which are often used to produce illegal narcotics like heroin. This
paper presents an agent-based model that simulates policy scenarios to
characterize how the production of poppy can be dampened and replaced with
licit crops over time. The model is initialized with spatial data, including
transportation network and satellite-derived land use data. Parameters
representing national subsidies, insurgent influence, and trafficking blockades
are varied to represent different conditions that might encourage or discourage
poppy agriculture. Our model shows that boundary-level interventions, such as
targeted trafficking blockades at border locations, are critical in reducing
the attractiveness of growing this illicit crop. The principle of least effort
implies that interventions decrease to a minimal non-regressive point, leading
to the prediction that increases in insurgency or other changes are likely to
lead to worsening conditions, and improvements require substantial jumps in
intervention resources.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures; GeoJournal, 2012, 10.1007/s10708-012-9453-
Networks of Economic Market Interdependence and Systemic Risk
The dynamic network of relationships among corporations underlies cascading economic failures including the current economic crisis, and can be inferred from correlations in market value fluctuations. We analyze the time dependence of the network of correlations to reveal the changing relationships among the financial, technology, and basic materials sectors with rising and falling markets and resource constraints. The financial sector links otherwise weakly coupled economic sectors, particularly during economic declines. Such links increase economic risk and the extent of cascading failures. Our results suggest that firewalls between financial services for different sectors would reduce systemic risk without hampering economic growth.