The determinants of recovery from the Black Saturday bushfire: demographic factors,behavioural characteristics and financial literacy

We investigate the contribution of demographic factors, behavioural characteristics and financial literacy to recovery from the financial losses inflicted by the Black Saturday bushfire. Behavioural characteristics (such as overconfidence, self-serving and loss aversion biases) in conjunction with bushfire survivors’ knowledge of financial indicators are used to determine recovery time. Data are collected through in-depth interviews with bushfire survivors, academics and experts in natural disasters. The results show that demographic, behavioural and financial literacy factors have the potential to enhance the recovery process.     

Food insecurity in developing countries

Despite improvements in the world food predicament, the underlying causes of food crises have not disappeared. The aim of this article is to improve understanding of food security problems in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and to assess the relative merits of alternative national and international intervention schemes. The article includes discussion of the concept of ‘food security’, policies that can be undertaken at the national level, a quantitative assessment of national food insecurity for a sample of LDCs, and an examination of the proposed international policies to enhance food security in food-deficit countries.     

Performance of the Ambient Tax: Does the Nature of the Damage Matter?

The ambient tax is often considered as an efficient instrument to achieve a first best outcome of ambient pollution when the regulator cannot observe individual emissions, or when monitoring costs are prohibitive. While this view is supported to a large extent by experimental findings, there remains several hurdles that hinder the implementation of the ambient tax in the field. One of these hurdles is the nature of the damage. Experimental findings suggest that the efficiency of the ambient tax is higher under external damage, i.e. if ambient pollution affects non-polluters (Spraggon in J Public Econ 84:427–456, 2002) than under internal damage, i.e. if ambient pollution affects polluters themselves (Cochard et al. in Environ Resour Econ 30:393–422, 2005). But this result rests on very different experimental settings. Therefore, we designed a new experiment that allows to compare external and internal damage within a common setting. Our main finding is that the ambient tax is equally efficient under internal and external damage.