The risk impacts of global natural and technological disasters

This research develops an expected risk model and estimates risk impacts of single or multiple disasters in terms of human fatality, injury, affected, and economic damage for nearly 200 nations. Both natural hazards, including geophysical, meteorological, hydrological, and technological disasters, such as industrial, transport, and structural, are considered. Relevant measures of expected risk, such as standard deviation, coefficient of variance, range, and rank are also calculated to assess a country's overall risk. Social-economic-physical factors from the World Development Index developed by the United Nations (UN) are then regressed with occurrences and risks of natural and tech disasters to seek plausible associations. The results show that (1) the model performs reasonably well in fitting observed and modeled risks and risk impacts, relatively better for natural disaster and affected people and economic damage; (2) while natural disasters are far more risky than tech ones in total risk impacts; specific risks for subgroups of natural or tech disasters vary widely in magnitude and by country; (3) high natural and/or tech risks concentrate in a small number of countries, such as China, India, Bangladesh in Asia; U.S., Mexico, Canada in North America; Turkey, Russia, France, Germany in Europe, and Algeria, Egypt, and Ethiopia in Africa, which are relatively large in population, fast in development, or advanced in industrialization; yet (4) high risk deviations per unit risk impacts reveal that many small, developing, and tech backward countries need to prepare even more for both natural and tech disasters. Finally, (5) while many country-level development factors, together with disaster occurrence, are statistically significant, only some can provide weak predictability of disaster risk impacts under robust regression. The research findings provide useful risk references to countries for resilient national policies for disaster preparation, mitigation, and recovery.     

巨灾风险管理中的行业损失担保

行业损失担保是一种赔付主要由巨灾所造成的整个保险行业损失所触发的保险连结证券。与传统再保险相似,它也要事先确定合约的涵盖地域、灾害种类、责任限额和有效时间等。但它与传统再保险不同在于,赔付取决于两个损失触发条件,即购买者的实际损失和整个保险行业的损失。本文从行业损失担保的市场发展、定义与运行机制、精算定价等角度,对其进行了系统梳理分析,并把它与其他巨灾风险连接证券进行了比较。