Defining, Measuring and Valuing Economic Resilience

[摘要] The concept of resilience in social-economic systems has become so popular among policy making and research communities; the building, enhancing or maintaining of resilience has become almost cliché. However, as a concept we don’t often know very much about the underlying forces that drive resilience in social-economic systems. Complicating this, our applications might be misleading; resilience in social and economic policy is often approached using the tools from ecological resilience, although decision-makers don’t have a formalised role in such approaches. We argue that the presence of a decision-maker in social-economic systems requires an entirely new approach, which explicitly treats decisions as the thresholds among alternative regimes. We show how economic resilience differs from alternative resilience concepts and provide a mathematical framework that can be used to evaluate the resilience of an economic regime.We show how new developments in the application of real options analysis to questions of optimal timing can be used to more clearly define and measure the concept of economic resilience. Each regime has its own patterns of costs, benefits and risks which determine the position of thresholds through time. This perspective on economic resilience is important because the thresholds between alternative regimes can be characterised as decision thresholds. In these systems, we don’t know how much time we have before a decision must be taken and a threshold is crossed. We develop a concept of expected time as a measure of economic resilience and illustrate the levers which can enhance or diminish the resilience of a regime. Because any uncertain decision-context can be expressed using the expected time to a threshold, we can use this approach to investigate resilience in systems which don’t have stable attractors. This means that the approach is relevant to a broad range of economic contexts and applications. Examples are developed for understanding poverty traps (a resilient and undesirable regime), the adoption of new technologies and of government intervention in market pricing.

[发布日期] 2017-09-13 [发布机构] CSIRO

[效力级别] Mathematical Economics [学科分类] 地球科学(综合)