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Sunday, January 20, 2013

Global Risks 2013

The time of year has come around again for the World Economic Forum and its various research publications on Risk Management. This year the whole program is dedicated to the theme of resilience.

In this short blog posting, we'll take a look at the WEF report on Global Risks 2013 and which country comes out best as a leader in risk management.

Before reading on, can you guess who is going to be at the top of the league table?
  
Global Risks 2013
The Global Risks 2013 report is broken up into six sessions, with a heavy focus on testing different jurisdictions around the world in respect to their ability to cope with various catastrophes. These  adversities or catastrophes are based around a concept that has been coined centers of gravity that act like intertwined scenarios of potential doom. Theoretically, the countries that do best have the highest preparedness score to cope with adversity.


World Economic Forum | WEF Reports [Link]

Fragility, robustness, resilience are actually very fashionable concepts in risk management at the moment and there is this sense, that the World Economic Forum's risk publications are in some way aligned to the ideals that Nassim Taleb shares in his latest book, Anitfragile.

Country Resilience
The aim of the WEF Global Risks 2013 report is to develop a framework which can be used to identify the features or elements that need to be in place to build a resilient economy.
This diagnostic tool is intended to measure the resilience of a country to global risks by treating it as a system composed of subsystems ... What makes an economic system resilient is different from what makes an ecological system resilient.
Global Risks 2013 | WEF Reports [Link]

Of course when we look at such benchmark schemes, we always tend to wonder how our country rates in the grand global scheme of all things about risk, and the table below will save you from any further suspense.

National Resilience to Global Risks | World Economic Forum [Link]

How some countries ended up in this ranking and in the context of resilience, definitely gives us plenty of unexpected surprises and this is even more so the case, if you have traveled to any of these places with your eyes open. All this aside and even if the results are up for a challenge, the concept of building a resilience rating index is absolutely fascinating and potentially very useful.

 World Resilience Rating | WEF In Charts

If you read section 3 [Link] you will find that it is a well thought through piece of work and I like the way the program has weaved in a five "R" concept around; Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness, Response and Recovery.  All in all, this is an excellent research program and the WEF have been kind enough to share their data with everyone in an interactive data explorer [LINK]. The data explorer is also worth a look and it will furnish you with some pretty fancy charts and a list of the top fifty risks facing the planet today.

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