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"Disaster relief United States Finance."
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Preparedness and response for catastrophic disasters
Based on a popular course for the FEMA Higher Education project, this volume provides important insight into plans to mitigate and respond to the devastation caused by large-scale catastrophic events.
eBook
Disasters and Social Reproduction
Reductions in state spending have put significant strain on communities during disasters. When hurricanes, floods and earthquakes hit, the responsibility for emergency relief is shifted from the state onto civil society. Disasters and Social Reproduction builds upon Marxist-Feminist elaborations of unwaged forms of labour, arguing that social reproduction theory is best understood as a dynamic between the state, the market and civil society. Following the long economic crisis of the 1970s, disaster relief has become increasingly reliant on the unwaged reproductive labour of ordinary people, allowing the US state to cut back on social spending, a shift that has fundamentally reconfigured the responsibilities of the state and civil society. As sea levels rise, climate change worsens and we see an increase in disaster relief led by communities, this analysis of the interrelations between state, society and grassroots initiatives, including Occupy Sandy and the American Black Cross, will prove indispensable.
eBook
Calamities, Debt, and Growth in Developing Countries
Public debt in developing economies rose at a fast clip during 2020–2021, at least partly due to the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman opined in early 2021 that “fighting covid is like fighting a war.” This paper empirically examines trends in debt and economic growth around the onset of three types of calamities, namely natural disasters, armed conflicts, and external debt distress in developing countries. The estimations provide quantitative estimates of differences in GDP growth and debt trends in economies suffering episodes of calamities relative to the trends observed in economies not experiencing calamities. The paper finds that debt and growth evolve quite differently depending on the type of calamity. With the empirical evidence in hand, the authors argue that debt-financed reconstruction efforts after natural disasters, and thus plausibly in the aftermath of the pandemic, can help accelerate growth after such disasters with lower debt burden than in the aftermath of episodes of armed conflict without necessarily incurring the economic costs associated with episodes of debt restructuring. However, the implied upward trajectory of the debt to GDP ratio in developing economies is not trivial, even after post-disaster growth upticks, which raises concerns about long-term debt sustainability after episodes of reconstruction after natural disasters. If so, the time for orderly preemptive debt restructuring might be approaching quickly since recoveries after debt defaults tend to be more costly.
Journal Article
Funding Public Health Emergency Preparedness in the United States
The historical precedents that support state and local leadership in preparedness for and response to disasters are in many ways at odds with the technical demands of preparedness and response for incidents affecting public health. New and revised laws and regulations, executive orders, policies, strategies, and plans developed in response to biological threats since 2001 address the role of the federal government in the response to public health emergencies. However, financial mechanisms for disaster response—especially those that wait for gubernatorial request before federal assistance can be provided—do not align with the need to prevent the spread of infectious agents or efficiently reduce the impact on public health. We review key US policies and funding mechanisms relevant to public health emergencies and clarify how policies, regulations, and resources affect coordinated responses.
Journal Article
Re-anchoring capital in disaster-devastated spaces
This paper contributes to scholarship on the relationship between financialisation and the production of urban space by examining the implementation of the Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone Act of 2005 (Pub. L. No. 109–135). From 2005 to December 2011, the GO Zone provided over $23 billion in tax-free, low-interest bonds and other tax incentives to individuals and businesses in the Gulf Coast area affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Drawing on government documents, planning reports, and interviews, I identify the limitations of the GO Zone and provide a critical assessment of the use of financialisation techniques to revitalise disaster-devastated communities. In doing so, my investigation seeks to deepen scholarly understanding of post-disaster regulatory experiments to illuminate the mechanisms underlying the production and regulation of uneven spatial development. My analysis challenges accounts that locate financialisation in deregulatory initiatives and, in contrast, shows that financialisation is a state-driven process that exacerbates risk and is associated with a series of intense contradictions, regulatory failures, and crisis tendencies.
Journal Article
From 9/11 to 8/29: Post-Disaster Recovery and Rebuilding in New York and New Orleans
This article examines the process of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding in New York City since 9/11 and in New Orleans since the Hurricane Katrina disaster (8/29). As destabilizing events, 9/11 and 8/29 forced a rethinking of the major categories, concepts and theories that long dominated disaster research. We analyze the form, trajectory and problems of reconstruction in the two cities with special emphasis on the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant program, the Liberty Zone and the Gulf Opportunity Zone, and tax-exempt private activity bonds to finance and promote reinvestment. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we show that New York and New Orleans have become important laboratories for entrepreneurial city and state governments seeking to use post-disaster rebuilding as an opportunity to push through far-reaching neoliberal policy reforms. The emphasis on using market-centered approaches for urban recovery and rebuilding in New York and New Orleans should be seen not as coherent or sustainable responses to urban disaster but rather as deeply contradictory restructuring strategies that are intensifying the problems they seek to remedy.
Journal Article
Defining hospital community benefit activities using Delphi technique: A comparison between China and the United States
Currently there is no expert consensus regarding what activities and programs constitute hospital community benefits. In China, the hospital community benefit movement started gaining attention after the recent health care system reform in 2009. In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service and the nonprofit hospital sector have struggled to define community benefit for many years. More recently, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)'s new \"community benefit\" requirements, nonprofit hospitals further developed these benefits to qualify for 501(c)(3) tax exempt status.
The Delphi survey method was used to explore activities and/or programs that are considered to be hospital community benefits in China and the United States. Twenty Chinese and 19 American of academics, senior hospital managers and policy makers were recruited as experts and participated in two rounds of surveys. The survey questionnaire was first developed in China using the 5-point Likert scale to rate the support for certain hospital community benefits activities; it was then translated into English. The questionnaires were modified after the first round of Delphi. After two rounds of surveys, only responses with a minimum of 70 percent support rate were accepted by the research team.
Delphi survey results show that experts from China and the U.S. agree on 68.75 percent of HCB activities and/ or programs, including emergency preparedness, social benefit activities, bad debt /Medicaid shortfall, disaster relief, environmental protection, health promotion and education, education and research, charity care, medical services with positive externality, provision of low profit services, and sliding scale fees.
In China, experts believe that healthcare is a \"human right\" and that the government has the main responsibility of ensuring affordable access to healthcare for its citizens. Meanwhile, healthcare is considered a commodity in the U.S., and many Americans, especially those who are vulnerable and low-income, are not able to afford and access needed healthcare services. Though the U.S. government recognized the importance of community benefit and included a section in the ACA that outlines new community benefit requirements for nonprofit hospitals, there is a need to issue specific policies regarding the amounts and types of community benefits non-profit hospitals should provide to receive tax exemption status.
Journal Article
Flood Hazards, Insurance Rates, and Amenities: Evidence From the Coastal Housing Market
This study employs the hedonic property price method to examine the effects of flood hazard on coastal property values. We utilize Geographic Information System data on National Flood Insurance Program flood zones and residential property sales from Carteret County, North Carolina. Our results indicate that location within a flood zone lowers property value. Price differentials for flood risk and the capitalized value of flood insurance premiums are roughly equivalent-both exhibiting a nonlinear relationship in flood probability. Our results support the conclusion that flood zone designation and insurance premiums convey risk information to potential buyers in the coastal housing market.
Journal Article