Ex-ante investments in risk prevention and mitigation may yield high returns to reduce negative impacts of major disruptive events. However a number of sources suggest that much more is spent on ex-post disaster relief. While citizens, businesses and local government officials may be aware of risks, especially raised through past disruptive events, there are persisting disincentives for investing more effectively in risk prevention and mitigation measures. This is even more difficult in the current fiscal context, where many countries are struggling with fiscal consolidation measures, yet at the same time are facing severe constraints in facing the future fiscal costs of disruptive shocks. |
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Market failures, collective action problems, but also government failures may, to different extents across countries, be part of the reasons for why actors responsible for managing risks fail to contribute to reducing a society’s overall level of risk exposure. To overcome some of these failures and facilitate the necessary adjustment and investment, it is key to understand how the political and the economic systems influence the actors’ underlying incentive structures. Major disruptive events often help to overcome incentive distortions created by existing governance mechanisms. They therefore offer a good stepping stone to understand the critical success factors to promote and implement recent disaster risk reduction reforms across countries. Meeting objectivesThis workshop was organised under the auspices of the OECD High Level Risk Forum. It is part of the forum’s on-going activity on “A Boost to Resilience: Overcoming the Political and Economic Obstacles in Managing Disruptive Shocks”, a project investigating the risk prevention and mitigation landscape across OECD countries. The objective of the expert meeting was to bring together senior technical directors from government, private sector, and applied research working in the field of risk prevention and mitigation across OECD countries to: (i) better understand current risk prevention and mitigation practices in their country and international contexts; (ii) distil good practices and existing challenges when it comes to (iii) mobilising risk prevention and mitigation actors to carry out their assigned roles, and (iv) facilitate exchange and contribute to the discussion on how governments can make reform for enhanced risk prevention and mitigation happen. The later will contribute to the wider objective of the OECD’s risk prevention and mitigation activity whose draft report will be presented at the OECD High Level Risk Forum in December 2013. |
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OECD Reviews of Risk Management Policies |
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