Suchergebnisse

This review summarizes the empirical literature on the effects of natural disasters and weather variations on international trade flows. A first result is that the body of literature is actually not as small as previously suggested. In total, I summarize 19 studies of 18 independent research teams and show that there is a large diversity in terms of motivations, data sets used, methodologies, and results. Still, some overarching conclusions can be drawn. Increases in average temperature seem to have a detrimental effect on export values (less on imports), mainly for manufactured and agricultural products. Given climate change, this is an important finding for projecting long-term developments of trade volumes. Imports seem to be less affected by temperature changes in the importing country. Findings on the effects of natural disasters are more ambiguous, but at least it can be said that exports seem to be affected negatively by occurrence and severity of disasters in the exporting country. Imports may decrease, increase, or remain unaffected by natural disasters. Regarding heterogeneous effects, small, poor, and hot countries with low degrees of institutional quality and political freedom seem to face the most detrimental effects on their trade flows. Possible directions of future research include analyzing spillover effects in-depth (in terms of time, space, and trade networks), considering adaptation, and using more granular data.

Public flood protection cannot totally eliminate the risk of flooding. Hence, private mitigation measures which proactively protect homes from being flooded or reduce flood damage are an essential part of modern flood risk management. This study analyses private flood mitigation measures among German households. The dataset covers more than 6000 households from all parts of the country, including flood plains as well as areas which are typically not at a high risk of riverine flooding. The results suggest that the propensity to mitigate flood damage increases i.a. with past damage experience and damage expectations for the future. The latter effect can be interpreted as a 'climate adaptation signal' in the flood mitigation behaviour. All other factors remaining equal, a strong belief in a climate-change-induced increase of personal flood damage in the next decades induces an increase of the probability of flood mitigation by more than 10 percentage points. Moreover, strong evidence for moral hazard effects in the flood mitigation behaviour cannot be observed. Households expecting insurance coverage do not reduce their mitigation efforts. Likewise, the expectation of government relief payments hinders mitigation only for some groups of households.

AbstractIn the context of integrated flood risk management, governments and public agencies aim to strengthen flood risk reduction and insurance at the household level. They often employ awareness campaigns in order to educate the public about flood risk and possible coping strategies. However, the effectiveness of these awareness campaigns has hardly been examined empirically, and the available analyses come to ambiguous conclusions. Evaluations based on longitudinal data of actual household behavior are missing. In this study, we perform two independent empirical analyses to assess whether a large‐scale awareness campaign in Germany affected private flood protection or insurance behavior. We thereby exploit the fact that different federal states initiated the campaign at different points in time between 2009 and 2017. In the first analysis, we use a longitudinal data set of a national sample of 6,729 household heads in the years 2012 and 2014 and focus on three federal states that launched the campaign in 2013. In the second analysis, we use flood damage and insurance penetration data at the federal state level from 2002 to 2018 (N = 256). Based on a fixed effects difference‐in‐differences estimator, we do not find that the campaign had a significant effect on households' behaviors, damage, or insurance penetration. The results show that large‐scale flood risk awareness campaigns, as they are currently conducted in many countries, have a limited effectiveness in terms of strengthening actual flood protection or insurance behavior of households.

Although natural hazard insurance is advocated as an important means of risk management, private insurance demand often remains below critical levels. Prior loss experience and the design of governmental relief schemes are two factors potentially influencing insurance decisions. We address these two elements in monetary incentivized experiments which include representations of natural hazard insurance schemes in Europe. We draw on two very different samples: First, we run a laboratory experiment with a student subject pool in Germany. In addition, we replicate the experiment as an online experiment with citizens of flood-prone areas in the city of Dornbirn (Austria). The experiment reflects two possible designs of governmental relief schemes: partial but guaranteed relief and full but nonguaranteed relief. The risk of loss is kept constant over ten consecutive rounds to analyze the effect of loss experience. In both of our samples, the design of the governmental relief scheme has no effect on insurance decisions. Furthermore, prior loss experience adversely affects insurance decisions. Uninsured subjects tend to remain uninsured after experiencing a loss, and previously insured subjects often switch to non-insurance in the rounds after the loss. These results have important policy implications, e.g., for the optimal design of flood risk communication.

Die Corona-Pandemie hat die Sorgen um den Klimawandel nicht verdrängt, zeigt eine aktuelle Befragung. Die Klimapolitik prägte die öffentliche Diskussion im Jahr 2019. Dann kam die CoronaEpidemie nach Deutschland - und bestimmt seitdem die politische und mediale Debatte. Dennoch bleibt der Klimawandel aus Sicht der Bevölkerung ein zentrales Thema. Das zeigt eine aktuelle Befragung des RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, des ZEW Manheim und weiterer Kooperationspartner: Mehr als 90 Prozent der Befragten geben an, dass sich die Bedeutung des Klimawandels seit Jahresbeginn nicht verändert oder sogar noch zugenommen habe.