• Comparing Water Risk Tools for Companies and Investors

    Faced with worsening water security across the globe, companies and investors are increasingly concerned about the water risks faced by their operations, supply chains and investments – and looking for tools to help to assess these risks. New report details similarities and differences between three leading water tools.

  • Australian Investigators Debunk 5G-COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory

    One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories recently created is the one claiming a connection between 5G technology and the virus. Believers argue that that either 5G was responsible for coronavirus, due to the construction of 5G networks in Wuhan, or for “poisoning cells” which created coronavirus. An Australian parliamentary investigation has now debunked this particular piece of misinformation.

  • Americans May Be Willing to Pay $5 Trillion to Stop the Spread of the Coronavirus and Save Lives

    A new analysis suggests Americans are willing to pay about US$5 trillion to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save as many lives as possible – dwarfing the $3 trillion Congress has so far agreed to spend to support the U.S. economy and its workers. Diego C. Nocetti and Luciana Echazu write in The Conversation that to get to that figure, they calculated the implicit value of public intervention measures like social distancing and statewide lockdowns – meant to prevent people from catching COVID-19 and possibly dying – by estimating how much people are willing to pay to have them implemented.

  • Lives vs Lives – the Global Cost of Lockdown

    The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen write in The Spectator that it all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level.

  • Forging a New Field: Finance Sustainability

    Climate economists have long focused on governmental policies, economic welfare and the economy as a whole. Financial economists – who study corporate bottom lines – had no scholarly forum for examining the intersection of finance and climate change – until now.

  • State Actions Played Lesser Role in COVID-19 Economic Damage

    Actions by state governments to try to limit the spread of COVID-19 played only a secondary role in the historic spike in U.S. unemployment in March, according to new research. Ohio State University says that while state actions to close schools were linked to an increase in unemployment, these effects were dwarfed by the larger national and international impact of the pandemic, according to researchers at the Ohio State University and Indiana University. Hispanics, young adults (aged 20-24), those without a college education and those with four or more children saw the steepest job losses. In two separate studies – here and here — the researchers took a broad look at the very early impact of the pandemic on jobs in the United States.

  • Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously

    Should states ease pandemic restrictions or extend lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders into the summer? That question confronts leaders across the United States. President Trump says that “we have to get our country open.” And many governors are moving quickly in that direction.Critics are dismayed. Citing forecasts that COVID-19 deaths could rise to 3,000 per day in June, they say that reopening without better defenses against infections is reckless. Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic that such denunciations cast the lockdown debate as a straightforward battle between a pro-human and a pro-economy camp. But the actual trade-offs are not straightforward. Set aside “flattening the curve,” which will continue to make sense. Are ongoing, onerous shutdowns warranted beyond what is necessary to avoid overwhelming ambulances, hospitals, and morgues? The answer depends in part on an unknown: how close the country is to containing the virus.

  • Enhancing Privacy Protections for Android Applications

    From navigation to remote banking, mobile device users rely on a variety of applications to streamline daily tasks, communicate, and dramatically increase productivity. While exceedingly useful, the ecosystem of third-party applications utilizes a number of sensors – microphones, GPS, pedometers, cameras – and user interactions to collect data used to enable functionality. Troves of sensitive personal data about users are accessible to these applications and as defense and commercial mobile device users become increasingly reliant on the technology, there are growing concerns around the challenge this creates for preserving user privacy.

  • Assessing Cyber Risk from External Information

    There is a vision for the future of assessing cybersecurity: The goal is a system of cyber metrics that are transparent, auditable, practical, scalable and widely agreed upon. To that end, it is useful—indeed, imperative—to evaluate various approaches to cyber risk quantification with the aim of informing the development of a public standard for measuring cybersecurity.

  • U.K. Government Has “Terrorized” Britons into Believing Coronavirus Will Kill Them, Says Adviser

    The Government’s coronavirus warnings have “effectively terrorised” Britons “into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you” even though most those infected will not be hospitalized, one of its advisers has warned. Christopher Hope writes in The Telegraph that Professor Robert Dingwall also said that “Eighty per cent of the people who get this infection will never need to go near a hospital. The ones who do go to hospital because they are quite seriously ill, most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care. We have completely lost sight of that in the obsession with deaths.”

  • Just 332 under-45s Have Died in U.K. from Corona. It's Madness to Keep Them from Work While Our Economy Burns

    Alex Brummer writes in the Daily Mail that as a financial writer, he has reported on Britain’s humiliating search for a bail-out from the International Monetary Fund in 1976, on the stock market crash of 1987, the U.K.’s ejection from the European Monetary System (precursor of the euro) in 1992 and the financial crisis of 2008-09. “I can honestly say we’ve never had it so bad,” he writes. We are not just condemning a generation of young people to long-term joblessness, we are also encumbering the country with levels of debt which it will take decades to pay off and could even linger into the 22nd century. (Remember, the debts incurred as a result of World War II were only finally paid off by Gordon Brown in 2006.) Each of their deaths is a tragedy. But the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that, up until April 24, only 332 people under the age of 45 have died from Covid-19 out of 27,356 deaths in total. No one wants to see a second or third peak to this crisis. But the truth is we are living on borrowed time and money. If Britain wants to have the resources to run the NHS, provide decent social care, get our schools and universities up and running, and maintain the defence and safety of the realm then the economy has to be resuscitated — and fast.And there could be no better vanguard to bring us back from the economic precipice than a workforce of the under-45s. 

  • Past Pandemics Show How Coronavirus Budgets Can Drive Faster Economic Recovery

    There have been crises before the coronavirus crisis, but what is different is the scale of the current crisis. Ilan Noy writes that Economies everywhere are in freefall and unemployment is rising. Gross domestic product figures for the first quarter of 2020 show economic declines not seen since WWII. The challenge for governments is to manage both expectations and spending to drive recovery.

  • Essential U.S. Workers Often Lack Sick Leave and Health Care – Benefits Taken for Granted in Most Other Countries

    The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the degree to which we depend on the work of others. This is particularly true of essential workers like truck drivers, grocery store employees and hospital nurses who are ensuring the rest of us stay safe and are able to get the supplies, food and health care we need. Paul F. Clark writes in The Conversation that the pandemic has also drawn attention to the fact that these workers, like all Americans, do not receive many of the basic workplace benefits and protections – like paid sick leave and basic health care – that workers in almost every other developed country in the world receive as a matter of course. Once the pandemic ends, much of the American workforce will still be without basic benefits and protections taken for granted in virtually every other developed country.

  • Public Unaware of “Horrible” Economic Damage Waiting “Around the Corner,” Former Chancellor Warns

    The British public is unaware of the “horrible” economic damage that is “coming around the corner” due to the coronavirus outbreak, a former chancellor has said, warning that the government’s furlough scheme has lulled workers into a “false sense of security.” Harry Yorke writes in The Telegraph that amid growing expectations that some companies may not reopen before Christmas, Lord Lamont said on Tuesday that he feared some sectors of the economy “will disappear” after the lockdown has been lifted. Lord Lamont, who served as Chancellor to John Major between 1990 and 1993, added that people currently reliant on the job retention scheme “may not realize their jobs have disappeared or about to… or that their firm is in serious trouble.” His comments come after the current Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, acknowledged on Monday that the furlough scheme, which is covering 6.3 million workers at a cost of £8 billion, is not a “sustainable situation” in the long-term.

  • Sweden Escapes Economic Slump by Refusing to Impose Lockdown

    Sweden has reaped the benefits of keeping its economy out of lockdown after escaping the dramatic growth slumps suffered by European rivals. Russell Lynch writes in The Telegraph that the Scandinavian country has taken a far more relaxed approach to tackling the coronavirus than much of the West, keeping most schools, restaurants and businesses open and relying on a voluntary approach to social distancing. Official figures show the country’s economy shrank by just 0.3 percent in the first three months of 2020, a far smaller decline than most forecasters and its central bank expected. The Riksbank had penciled in a drop of between 0.8 percent and 1.8 percent. The smaller scale of the fall contrasts with record slumps seen elsewhere across the Eurozone over the quarter as governments imposed much more stringent measures. France’s economy tumbled 5.8 percent, Italy’s 4.7 percent and Spain’s by 5.2 percent, while the Eurozone’s output overall sank by 3.8 percent - the worst decline in its history. The figures are likely to be far worse in the second quarter as lockdowns grind on.