健康在多大程度上引致贫困脆弱性——基于CHNS农村数据的经验分析

贫困脆弱性的产生,很大程度上归因于居民健康水平的下降.在阐述健康引致贫困理论机制的基础上,基于CHNS在2000-2009年间追踪调查数据,对贫困脆弱性和健康效用指数HUI进行测度,估计并分析健康对贫困脆弱性的影响与内在机制.研究发现:居民健康水平的恶化会使其面临更高的贫困脆弱性,居民健康水平每下降10％,贫困脆弱性大约会上升6％；健康影响贫困脆弱性的作用机制中,物质资本和社会资本渠道被证明是相对有效的,而人力资本渠道尽管体现出微弱效应,但尚未在统计上得到显著性验证.因此,制订前瞻性的反贫政策应着眼于建立健康风险防范机制,包括提高农村医疗保障水平和重大疾病救助力度,并增加农村公共服务的投入,以促进其均衡化发展.     

A Discussion of Findings and Their Possible Implications from a Workshop on Bioterrorism Threat Assessment and Risk Management

In November 2001, the Monterey Institute of International Studies convened a workshop on bioterrorism threat assessment and risk management. Risk assessment practitioners from various disciplines, but without specialized knowledge of terrorism, were brought together with security and intelligence threat analysts to stimulate an exchange that could be useful to both communities. This article, prepared by a subset of the participants, comments on the workshop's findings and their implications and makes three recommendations, two short term (use of threat assessment methodologies and vulnerability analysis) and one long term (application of quantitative risk assessment and modeling), regarding the practical application of risk assessment methods to bioterrorism issues.     

农村家庭“因教致贫”现象解读与政策建议——基于脆弱性理论视角

教育具有促进政治进步、经济发展、文化传承的正向功能。然而,"知识改变命运"作为一个真理性的命题,在我国广大农村地区似乎成为了一个悖论,出现了较大面积的"因教致贫"反常现象。农村"因教致贫"问题具有多维度性和多层面性,是一个复杂的系统性问题。一般来说,此问题涉及到农村的经济基础、自然环境、政策环境以及社会环境等各个层面,农村家庭的抗风险能力差决定了农民家庭脆弱性程度较高,较高的脆弱性是导致"因教致贫"的真正原因。因此,从就学就业先后顺序出发,引入脆弱性理论,分析"因教致贫"动态形成过程中的脆弱性因子,对农村地区"因教致贫"现象进行深入探讨和研究,并提出相应的政策建议。     

What if gender became an essential,standard element of Vulnerability Assessments?

Vulnerability Assessments (VAs) can be useful tools for providing key insights for non-government organisations and other development actors, including governments. Not only can they provide an extensive, ‘landscape-wide’ understanding of vulnerability and its underlying causes in a specific context, but this understanding can be jointly owned by all participants. They can thus be used for designing risk reduction and resilience-building measures, programmes, or projects that affect specific groups within a community or the landscape. Beyond that, VAs can provide a platform that promotes interaction among otherwise disconnected stakeholders, as well as the evidence and argumentation for community groups to engage in advocacy with local and municipal/district authorities. This article draws on our combined experience as development practitioners, and considers what we have learnt about the importance of integrating gender issues into VAs.     

On Some Recent Definitions and Analysis Frameworks for Risk,Vulnerability, and Resilience

Recently, considerable attention has been paid to a systems‐based approach to risk, vulnerability, and resilience analysis. It is argued that risk, vulnerability, and resilience are inherently and fundamentally functions of the states of the system and its environment. Vulnerability is defined as the manifestation of the inherent states of the system that can be subjected to a natural hazard or be exploited to adversely affect that system, whereas resilience is defined as the ability of the system to withstand a major disruption within acceptable degradation parameters and to recover within an acceptable time, and composite costs, and risks. Risk, on the other hand, is probability based, defined by the probability and severity of adverse effects (i.e., the consequences). In this article, we look more closely into this approach. It is observed that the key concepts are inconsistent in the sense that the uncertainty (probability) dimension is included for the risk definition but not for vulnerability and resilience. In the article, we question the rationale for this inconsistency. The suggested approach is compared with an alternative framework that provides a logically defined structure for risk, vulnerability, and resilience, where all three concepts are incorporating the uncertainty (probability) dimension.     

HIV Prevention,Gender and Sexual Health

Abstract

Drawing on a review of relevant literature as well as global experience, this paper focuses on aspects of the growing feminisation of the HIV epidemic, especially the combination of age and gender which makes young women particularly vulnerable to HIV. It also briefly touches upon the gender-constructed vulnerability of young men. The linkages between gender, sexual health and HIV-and what works to forge these linkages-have now been well established. Not acting on the basis of this knowledge in order to avert millions of infections and deaths due to HIV, is no longer an option.     

On the Complex Quantification of Risk: Systems‐Based Perspective on Terrorism

This article highlights the complexity of the quantification of the multidimensional risk function, develops five systems‐based premises on quantifying the risk of terrorism to a threatened system, and advocates the quantification of vulnerability and resilience through the states of the system. The five premises are: (i) There exists interdependence between a specific threat to a system by terrorist networks and the states of the targeted system, as represented through the system's vulnerability, resilience, and criticality‐impact. (ii) A specific threat, its probability, its timing, the states of the targeted system, and the probability of consequences can be interdependent. (iii) The two questions in the risk assessment process: “What is the likelihood?” and “What are the consequences?” can be interdependent. (iv) Risk management policy options can reduce both the likelihood of a threat to a targeted system and the associated likelihood of consequences by changing the states (including both vulnerability and resilience) of the system. (v) The quantification of risk to a vulnerable system from a specific threat must be built on a systemic and repeatable modeling process, by recognizing that the states of the system constitute an essential step to construct quantitative metrics of the consequences based on intelligence gathering, expert evidence, and other qualitative information. The fact that the states of all systems are functions of time (among other variables) makes the time frame pivotal in each component of the process of risk assessment, management, and communication. Thus, risk to a system, caused by an initiating event (e.g., a threat) is a multidimensional function of the specific threat, its probability and time frame, the states of the system (representing vulnerability and resilience), and the probabilistic multidimensional consequences.     

公路桥梁技术状况评定体系及其应用

桥梁结构的损伤、功能不足和易损性都可以表示为技术状况，并以技术状况等级来描述。桥梁技术状况是处理的依据，通过把技术状况映射到处理，可行处理的编号就决定了技术状况的编号。本文针对桥梁结构养护需要采取的处理措施，确定了对应于损伤、功能不足和易损性等的公路桥梁技术状况的体系及相应的评价指标，并通过对两种养护维修策略的分析阐述了其应用。     

Income vulnerability of rural households in Bangladesh: a comparison between Bayesian and classical methods

The geographical location and the monsoon climate render Bangladesh highly vulnerable to natural hazards, deteriorating the country's socio-economic stability. This study is based on 500 randomly chosen rural households from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey [Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Planning Division, Ministry of Planning, Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2006]. The objectives are to estimate the income vulnerability of rural households and to check whether the Bayesian approaches (natural conjugate prior and non-informative prior estimates) have any superiority over the classical (feasible generalized least square (FGLS)) method. The poverty level, measured from the data, is 24%; whereas the vulnerability estimates, using FGLS, natural conjugate prior and non-informative prior are 31%, 69% and 82%, respectively. Vulnerability estimates by the Bayesian natural conjugate prior approach is found to have greater efficiency compared with FGLS and non-informative prior approaches.     

An Optimization‐Based Framework for the Identification of Vulnerabilities in Electric Power Grids Exposed to Natural Hazards

This article proposes a novel mathematical optimization framework for the identification of the vulnerabilities of electric power infrastructure systems (which is a paramount example of critical infrastructure) due to natural hazards. In this framework, the potential impacts of a specific natural hazard on an infrastructure are first evaluated in terms of failure and recovery probabilities of system components. Then, these are fed into a bi‐level attacker–defender interdiction model to determine the critical components whose failures lead to the largest system functionality loss. The proposed framework bridges the gap between the difficulties of accurately predicting the hazard information in classical probability‐based analyses and the over conservatism of the pure attacker–defender interdiction models. Mathematically, the proposed model configures a bi‐level max‐min mixed integer linear programming (MILP) that is challenging to solve. For its solution, the problem is casted into an equivalent one‐level MILP that can be solved by efficient global solvers. The approach is applied to a case study concerning the vulnerability identification of the georeferenced RTS24 test system under simulated wind storms. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for identifying critical locations under multiple hazard events and, thus, for providing a useful tool to help decisionmakers in making more‐informed prehazard preparation decisions.