Ilan Noy, Ph.D.
Chair in the Economics of Disasters, School of Economics and Finance | GRRN Participant, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Ilan Noy is an expert in international and development economics and natural disasters, financial crises and capital flows.
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Biography
Professor Ilan Noy is the inaugural Chair in the Economics of Disasters, established in July 2013 with sponsorship from Victoria University, the Earthquake Commission (EQC) and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). It is understood to be the first such Chair in the world.
The focus of the Chair is on the research and application of economics and public policy insights to the management of natural and other disasters.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Finanical Crises
Development Economics
International Economics
Natural Disasters
Education (2)
University of California, Santa Cruz: Ph.D.
Hebrew University, Jerusalem: B.A.
Links (2)
Media Appearances (5)
Concerns Government kept in the dark about dramatic changes to the way some homes are insured
TV NZ online
2018-06-23
Last week Ursula Egan discovered the cost of insuring her four bedroom house in Karori suddenly jumped from $2200 to $7200. Chair in Economics of Disasters, Ilan Noy, says it's a sign insurance is changing. "We are worried that the insurance sector will start or is starting to withdraw from various locations… and we are sort of in the dark about that," Mr Noy said. [...]
What happens to NZ if global nuclear war breaks out?
News Hub online
2018-06-03
Now for the bad news: even if we're spared the worst of these effects, the impact of nuclear war would reverberate in the South Pacific thanks to trade and the economy. This wouldn't be the case in every scenario, says Ilan Noy, Victoria University's Professorial Chair in the Economics of Disasters, who examines economics and public policy as they relate to the management of natural disasters. In the case of a local war between India and Pakistan, which aren't large traders, the effects would be somewhat muted. [...]
Sea level-prone homes set for insurance cutoff
Radio NZ online
2017-04-29
Report co-author Ilan Noy, a disaster economics researcher at Victoria University, said those houses would be too exposed to sea-level rise, to storm surges, to riverine flooding and they will no longer be sustainable to be there. "We argue that currently most of these homes are insured, but at some point in the future insurance will no longer be available to these homes. "All insurance policies are one year policies in New Zealand and probably elsewhere. So insurance can retreat very quickly from places where they think the risk is too high. [...]
Heads in the sand, houses in the water
Stuff online
2017-05-03
"At some point in the future (time unknown), there are going to be thousands of properties … which will no longer be insurable by the private insurance companies," says Ilan Noy, Victoria University professor of the economics of disaster, and co-author of the report. [...]
New measure evaluates human impact of Canterbury quake
Phys.Org online
2015-05-11
Professor Ilan Noy, Victoria's Chair in the Economics of Disasters, has devised a measurement tool inspired by the World Health Organisation's Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) calculations, which assesses the cumulative number of 'lifeyears', or healthy years, citizens have lost due to death, injuries, being otherwise significantly affected such as having to evacuate their homes, and the financial damages they have incurred. [...]
Articles (5)
Vocational Education, Manufacturing, and Income Distribution: International Evidence and Case Studies
Open Economies Review
Joshua Aizenman, Yothin Jinjarak, Nam Ngo, Ilan Noy
2018 Economic integration has brought about not only benefits and opportunities but also required adjustment, especially for the youth entering the labour force. The lower growth rates characterizing the post Global Financial Crisis era and the concerns about income inequality put to the fore the degree that better targeted investment in human capital may ameliorate the challenges facing the working poor. Using cross-country data, we find the association between the income shares of the working poor, dependence on manufacturing sector, and the availability of vocational education. Conditioning on tertiary educational attainment, improved access to better vocational education will probably contribute more than large increase in regular college attainment. Comparing the US to Germany suggests that pushing more students to BA granting colleges may no longer be the most efficient way to deal with the challenges caused by the decline in manufacturing employment affecting in particular lower-income households. We also note that a tracking of technical training and educational budget, shown in the case of Vietnam in comparison to Thailand, as well as government subsidies for reskilling of labour fource throughout their career in Singapore, is a potential explanation for their relative manufacturing competitiveness.
Measuring the Impact of In-surance on Urban Recovery with Light: The 2010-2011 New Zealand Earthquakes
CESifo Working Papers
Cuong Nguyen, Ilan Noy
2018 We measure the longer-term effect of a major earthquake on the local economy, using nighttime light intensity measured from space, and investigate whether insurance claim payments for damaged residential property affected the local recovery process. We focus on the destructive Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) 2010 -2011 as our case study. Uniquely for this event, more than 95% of residential housing units were covered by insurance, but insurance payments were staggered over 5 years, enabling us to identify their local impact. We find that night-time luminosity can capture the process of recovery and describe the recovery’s determinants. We also find that insurance payments contributed significantly to the process of economic recovery after the earthquake, but delayed payments were less affective and cash settlement of claims were more effective than insurance-managed repairs in contributing to local recovery.
The measurement of disaster risk: An example from tropical cyclones in the Philippines
Review of Development Economics
Rio Yonson, Ilan Noy, JC Gaillard
2018 What determines disaster fatalities? We develop a tool to estimate tropical cyclone‐induced fatalities in the Philippine provinces, and to explain the variability of these fatalities across provinces using an evidence‐based approach. We construct a new provincial‐level panel dataset, and use statistical methods to assess the influence of socioeconomic vulnerability (i.e., levels of economic and social development, urbanization, governance), exposure (i.e., population, topography, and geography), and hazard characteristics (i.e., rainfall volume and wind speed) on the resulting fatalities from tropical cyclones. We find strong evidence that socioeconomic development and good local governance reduces disaster fatalities, while unplanned urbanization is associated with more fatalities. Exposure, including topography, and tropical cyclone strength are likewise important determinants of fatalities. However, disaster fatalities appear to be influenced much more by socioeconomic vulnerability and exposure, than by the hazard itself. We quantify this difference in order to contribute to policy planning at national and subnational scales.
Insuring property under climate change
Policy Quarterly
Belinda Storey, Ilan Noy
2018 Climate change will increasingly create severe risks for New Zealand’s coastal housing stock. Even a small amount of sea level rise will substantially exacerbate the costs of flooding and storm surges (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, 2015). Under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) three mitigation scenarios, global average sea levels are likely to rise by between 28cm and 73cm by 2100 (above the 1986–2005 average). Under the IPCC’s high emissions scenario the sea level is likely to rise by between 52cm and 98cm by 2100 (IPCC, 2013). Only collapse of parts of the Antarctic ice sheet, if triggered, could cause the sea level to rise substantially above these ranges. Some regions in New Zealand (including the main urban centres) have high enough quality geographic data to infer the number of homes at risk. In those regions, there are over 43,000 homes within 1.5m of the present average spring high tide and over 8,000 within 50cm.
Measurement of economic welfare risk and resilience of the Philippine regions
CESifo Working Papers
Rio Yonson, Ilan Noy
2018 Using an economic model to assess welfare risk and resilience to disasters, this paper systematically tackles the questions: 1) How much asset and welfare risks does each region in the Philippines face from riverine flood disasters? 2) How resilient is each region to riverine flood disasters? and 3) What are the available interventions per region to strengthen resilience to riverine flood disasters and what will be their measured benefit? We study the 18 regions of the Philippines to demonstrate the channels through which macroeconomic asset and output losses from disasters translate to consumption and welfare losses at the microeconomic level. Apart from the prioritization of regions based on resilience and welfare risk, we identify a menu of policy options ranked according to their level of effectiveness in increasing resilience and reducing welfare risk from riverine floods. While there are similarities in the ranking of policies among regions with comparable levels of resilience and welfare risk, the ranking of priorities varies for different regions. This suggests that there are region-specific conditions and drivers that need to be integrated into policies and development processes so that these conditions are effectively addressed. Overall, the results indicate that reduction of adverse disaster impacts, including welfare losses, and reduction of poverty are generally complementary.
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