Modeling Regional Economic Resilience to Disasters: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis of Water Service Disruptions*

Abstract. Recent natural and manmade disasters have had significant regional economic impacts. These effects have been muted, however, by the resilience of individual businesses and of regional markets, which refers to the inherent ability and adaptive responses that enable firms and regions to avoid potential losses. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis is a promising approach to disaster impact analysis because it is able to model the behavioral response to input shortages and changing market conditions. However, without further refinement, CGE models, as well as nearly all other economic models, reflect only “business‐as‐usual” conditions, when they are based on historical data. This paper advances the CGE analysis of major supply disruptions of critical inputs by: specifying operational definitions of individual business and regional macroeconomic resilience, linking production function parameters to various types of producer adaptations in emergencies, developing algorithms for recalibrating production functions to empirical or simulation data, and decomposing partial and general equilibrium responses. We illustrate some of these contributions in a case study of the sectoral and regional economic impacts of a disruption to the Portland Metropolitan Water System in the aftermath of a major earthquake.     

Environmental Risk and Uncertainty: Insights from Yucca Mountain

Abstract This study examines the effects of the risk from transporting high–level radioactive waste to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository on housing location decisions in Southern Nevada. Using data from a survey of southern Nevada households, we develop a model–based subjective risk estimate for each household. We then explore different factors that may influence the household's location decisions if the proposed transportation route is ultimately chosen for nuclear waste transport. We extend the conventional expected utility model to allow for uncertainty surrounding the actual risks borne by the household. Finally, we examine the impact of federal government compensation on households' location decisions. The findings indicate that residents currently living near the proposed transportation route express subjective risk estimates much larger than those reported by the Department of Energy. In general, households that are uncertain about the future risks are more likely to relocate than those expressing certainty. When everything is considered, the model predicts that between one and three percent of households living near the transportation route are likely to relocate. Compensation can influence some households to remain at their present location and bear the transport risk.     

The idea of global civil society

The main argument of this article is that the idea of global civil society challenges the concept of international relations. It traces the evolution of the idea of society and argues that civil society has always meant a rule-governed society where rules were based on some form of social contract among citizens. Historically, civil society was always territorially tied and contrasted with international relations between states. What changed in the 1980s and 1990s was the global dimension of civil society—a social contract is being negotiated across borders establishing a set of global rules involving states as well as international institutions. The article ends by asking whether September 11 and the war in Iraq mark a reversion to international relations.     

Characterisation of archaeological mortars from Pompeii (Campania,Italy) and identification of construction phases by compositional data analysis

This work describes the compositional characterisation of coccciopesto and natural pozzolanic mortars sampled in the Regio VI area of the archaeological site of Pompeii, with particular reference to the Casa di Pansa in Insula 6 and Casa 17 in Insula 2. Samples were studied by optical microscopy and analysed by XRF, SEM-EDS, LA-ICP-MS and XRPD. The XRF and SEM-EDS data, subjected to multivariate analysis (cluster analysis), identified the three main construction phases involved in building the Casa di Pansa. In addition, mineralogical and petrographic characteristics of the aggregate were determined and found to be compatible with pyroclastic deposits from the volcano Vesuvius. Study revealed C–S–H phases in the binder, due to pozzolanic hydration phemomena of hydrated lime with cocciopesto and natural pozzalana.     

When things were ‘closing-in’ and ‘rolling up’: the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish war novel The Last September

This paper examines the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Drawing on Said’s analysis of imaginative geographies as registers of territorial identity, I consider the ways in which Bowen’s text maps Anglo-Irish territorial identity in early twentieth-century Ireland. Reading the text as an authoritative, albeit subjective, record of Anglo-Irish experience in Ireland, I identify four interconnected spaces which constitute the imaginative geography of the novel: the open, empty and isolated country; a wider landscape of resistance and control; a distant but necessary England; and an historical landscape of colonial decline. In conclusion, I outline how the concept of imaginative geographies provides a useful lens through which the often fragmented and conflicted nature of territorial identities, both during and after the colonial period, can be explored.     

Social mobility and reproduction among nineteenth-century Colorado silver prospectors

Popular cultural convention holds that, for those with enough gumption, the American frontier was a land of unparalleled opportunity. However, careful research throws doubt on the universality of this convention. Thus, the authors explore factors that increase or decrease opportunities for upward mobility in frontier towns. The authors' longitudinal study of late nineteenth century silver prospectors in Gothic, Colorado, demonstrates that while enthusiastic prospecting in Gothic did not lead to upward social mobility, it did provide enhanced reproductive opportunities.     

Inter‐Indigenous development aid: markets,corporations, and biases

The Canadian government and the Meadow Lake Tribal Council sponsored a forest extraction corporation in eastern Nicaragua that restructured 16 Miskitu and Mayangna villages and transformed local human‐environment interactions. The Central American aid project demonstrated paternalistic and interventionist tendencies and exposed biases in inter‐Indigenous aid that rendered it inseparable from conventional aid. This case encourages reflection on social and ecological impacts from the marketing of collective resources, the creation of Indigenous development corporations, and the decision‐making criteria and processes driving foreign aid. The case study demonstrates how foreign aid programs targeting Indigenous Peoples may actually thwart the self‐determination that they set out to encourage. Aid agencies and business partners, who had limited knowledge of local cultures and institutions, created externally defined rules that instigated resource conflicts and undermined the authority of customary leaders without resolving poverty or uneven development.