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This volume presents an economic framework for the analysis of resilience in relation to societal, environmental, and personal security perspectives. It offers a rigorous definition of economic resilience and an operational metric, and it shows how they can be applied to measuring and applying the concept to private and public decision making. Major dimensions of resilience and their implications for human development are explored. Resilience is emphasized as a coping mechanism for dealing with short-term crises, such as natural disasters and acts of terrorism. As well, the author shows how lessons learned in the short-run out of necessity and through the application of human ingenuity can be incorporated into long-run sustainability practices. In part, this opportunity stems from viewing resilience as a process, one that enhances individual and societal competencies. The book links economic resilience to several other disciplines and examines the relationshipbetween resilience and various other key concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, and sustainability. It scrutinizes the measurement of economic resilience in terms of temporal, spatial, and scale dimensions. It examines the time-path of resilience and relates it to the recovery process.This work also looks closely at progress on the formulation of resilience indices and stresses the importance of actionable variables. It presents a risk-management framework, including aspects of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis. Additionally, it explores the role of resilience in relation to the co-benefits of disaster risk management.

This study develops a methodology for rapidly obtaining approximate estimates of the economic consequences from numerous natural, man-made and technological threats. This software tool is intended for use by various decision makers and analysts to obtain estimates rapidly. It is programmed in Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to facilitate its use. This tool is called E-CAT (Economic Consequence Analysis Tool) and accounts for the cumulative direct and indirect impacts (including resilience and behavioral factors that significantly affect base estimates) on the U.S. economy. E-CAT is intended to be a major step toward advancing the current state of economic consequence analysis (ECA) and also contributing to and developing interest in further research into complex but rapid turnaround approaches.The essence of the methodology involves running numerous simulations in a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for each threat, yielding synthetic data for the estimation of a single regression equation based on the identification of key explanatory variables (threat characteristics and background conditions). This transforms the results of a complex model, which is beyond the reach of most users, into a'reduced form'model that is readily comprehensible. Functionality has been built into E-CAT so that its users can switch various consequence categories on and off in order to create customized profiles of economic consequences of numerous risk events. E-CAT incorporates uncertainty on both the input and output side in the course of the analysis.