This review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap....

While the economic debate on climate policy focuses on discounting, we do not know yet what to discount. The potential (non-discounted) socio-economic cost of climate change, indeed, is still unknown. Only a few studies have tried to estimate socio-economic costs of climate change. Most of them...

This paper investigates the link between development, economic growth, and the economic losses from natural disasters in a normative analytical framework, with an illustration on hurricane flood risks in New Orleans. It concludes that, where capital accumulates through increased density of...

This article draws from a study that investigates the link between development, economic growth and the economic losses from natural hazards. Increasing investments in disaster risk reduction have led to a significant reduction in human casualties, but economic losses from natural disasters have...

This paper investigates the link between development, economic growth, and the economic losses from natural disasters in a normative analytical framework, with an illustration on hurricane flood risks in New Orleans. It concludes that, where capital accumulates through increased density of...

This study constructs a microdata set of about 143,000 firms to estimate the monetary costs of infrastructure disruptions in 137 low- and middle-income countries, representing 78 percent of the world population and 80 percent of the GDP of low- and -middle-income countries. Specifically, this...

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as its main measure of disaster severity. Using a new,...

Large-scale disasters regularly affect societies over the globe, causing large destruction and damage. After each of these events, media, insurance companies, and international institutions publish numerous assessments of the “cost of the disaster.” However these assessments are based on...

Assuming that capital productivity is higher in areas at risk from natural hazards (such as coastal zones or flood plains), this paper shows that rapid development in these areas-and the resulting increase in disaster losses-may be the consequence of a rational and well-informed trade-off...