Spatial distribution of damages from winter 2014 coastal storms in the northern coast of Spain: hazard, vulnerability and elements at risk

Durante el invierno de 2014 se produjo una sucesión de temporales que azotaron la costa galaico-cantábrica, generando cuantiosos daños, tanto en el medio natural como en equipamientos e infraestructuras, cuya restauración fue cuantificada en alrededor de 70 millones de €. Dada la especial sensibilidad de las playas a la erosión, este tipo de ambientes ha centrado la mayor parte del análisis. Los resultados muestran que la distribución espacial de esos daños guarda más relación con la valoración de estos espacios por parte de la población que con la intensidad del fenómeno natural o los condicionantes geomorfológicos, confirmando que las consecuencias de los eventos climáticos extremos no dependen exclusivamente de la peligrosidad del proceso sino también de la vulnerabilidad (natural y social) de la zona geográfica afectada y de la cantidad y valor de los elementos en situación de riesgo.The succession of storms events that hit the Galician-Cantabrian coast during the winter of 2014 caused considerable damages, in both the natural environment and the infrastructures and equipment, whose restoration was worth around 70 million €. Taking in mind the sensibility of beaches to erosion, these types of environments focused much of the analysis. The results show that the spatial distribution of those damages keep a closer relationship with the greater appreciation of these spaces by the population rather than the magnitude of the natural phenomenon or the geomorphological background. That idea confirms that the consequences of the extreme climatic events do not depend exclusively on the process hazardousness but also on the vulnerability (natural and social) of the geographical area affected and the quantity and value of the elements at risk

Assessing the efficiency of mother-to-child HIV prevention in low- and middle-income countries using data envelopment analysis

AIDS is one of the most significant health care problems worldwide. Due to the difficulty and costs involved in treating HIV, preventing infection is of paramount importance in controlling the AIDS epidemic. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to establish international comparisons on the efficiency of implementation of HIV prevention programmes. To do this we use data from 52 low- and middle-income countries regarding the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Our results indicate that there is a remarkable variation in the efficiency of prevention services across nations, suggesting that a better use of resources could lead to more and improved services, and ultimately, prevent the infection of thousands of children. These results also demonstrate the potential strategic role of DEA for the efficient and effective planning of scarce resources to fight the epidemic

Regional Productivity Variation and the Impact of Public Capital Stock : An Analysis with Spatial Interaction, with Reference to Spain

In this paper we examine whether variations in the level of public capital across Spain‟s Provinces affected productivity levels over the period 1996-2005. The analysis is motivated by contemporary urban economics theory, involving a production function for the competitive sector of the economy („industry‟) which includes the level of composite services derived from „service‟ firms under monopolistic competition. The outcome is potentially increasing returns to scale resulting from pecuniary externalities deriving from internal increasing returns in the monopolistic competition sector. We extend the production function by also making (log) labour efficiency a function of (log) total public capital stock and (log) human capital stock, leading to a simple and empirically tractable reduced form linking productivity level to density of employment, human capital and public capital stock. The model is further extended to include technological externalities or spillovers across provinces. Using panel data methodology, we find significant elasticities for total capital stock and for human capital stock, and a significant impact for employment density. The finding that the effect of public capital is significantly different from zero, indicating that it has a direct effect even after controlling for employment density, is contrary to some of the earlier research findings which leave the question of the impact of public capital unresolved

The hybrid returns-to-scale model and its extension by production trade-offs: an application to the efficiency assessment of public universities in Malaysia

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-015-1854-0Most applications of data envelopment analysis (DEA) employ standard constant or variable returns-to-scale (CRS or VRS) models. In this paper we suggest that these models may sometimes underutilize our knowledge of the underlying production process. For example, in the context of higher education considered in the reported application, individual universities often maintain a certain student-to-staff ratio which points that there should be an approximately proportional relationship between students and staff, at least in the medium to long run. A different example is an observation that the teaching of postgraduate students generally requires more resources than the teaching of the same number of undergraduate students. In order to incorporate such information in a DEA model, we propose a novel approach that combines the recently developed hybrid returns-to-scale DEA model with the use of production trade-offs. The suggested approach leads to a better-informed model of production technology than the conventional DEA models. We illustrate this methodology by an application to Malaysian public universities. This approach results in a tangibly better efficiency discrimination than would be possible with the standard DEA models