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Let them eat risk? Wealth, rights and disaster vulnerability
1Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003, USA. boyce@econs.umass.edu
Disasters
|October 12, 2000
Abstract:
Disaster-vulnerability reduction is an impure public good: when provided to one it is provided to others, but not equally provided to all. This means that in addition to the question of how much disaster-vulnerability reduction to provide, policymakers face the question of to whom it should be provided. This essay distinguishes between two broad classes of approaches to the latter question, one based on wealth, the other on rights.
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