All Recent FutureChallenges Posts

To give the country credit, Pakistan is one of the few countries in the world to not obey the Okun’s Law which observes a ~2 percent decrease in GDP for every percent increase in unemployment.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA. The Protect Intellectual Property Act, PIPA. The ISP based Australian Internet filter, the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 enforced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. These are a few examples of many governments’ attempts, both within Australia and internationally, to fight what they see […]

In the following, “real estate-oriented tourism” means any tourism strategy that consists of encouraging people to buy real estate as a secondary residence. In her article “The Great Land Rush”, Arrianna Marie Coleman alerts us to the fact that small farmers are the first to suffer from new land deals […]

Does the occurrence of a natural disaster such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, hurricane, epidemic, heat wave, and ⁄ or plague increase the risk of violent civil conflict in a society? This study uses available data for 187 political units for the period 1950–2000 to systematically explore this question […]

This paper conducts a first systematic investigation of the determinants and costs of terrorism attacks at the aggregate level. We use newly assembled datasets on terrorism attacks, natural disasters and  bank and currency crises to answer three questions: what are the determinants of terrorism incidence, is there an output cost […]

Natural disasters occur in a political space.  Although events beyond our control may trigger a disaster, the level of government preparedness and response greatly determines the extent of suffering incurred by the affected population.  We use a political economy model of disaster prevention,  supported by case studies and preliminary empirics […]