No abstract

No abstract

In Europe, floods are among the natural catastrophes that cause the largest economic damage. This article explores the potential of two distinct types of multivariate flood damage models: ‘depth‐damage’ models and ‘rainfall‐damage’ models. We use survey data of 346 Flemish households that were victim of pluvial floods complemented with rainfall data from both rain gauges and weather radars. In the econometrical analysis, a Tobit estimation technique is used to deal with the issue of zero damage observations. The results show that in the ‘depth‐damage’ models flood depth has a significant impact on the damage. In the ‘rainfall‐damage’ models there is a significant impact of rainfall accumulation on the damage when using the gauge rainfall data as predictor, but not when using the radar rainfall data. Finally, non‐hazard indicators are found to be important for explaining pluvial flood damage in both ‘depth‐damage’ and ‘rainfall‐damage’ models.

The creation of optimal land institutions attracted renewed attention in the 1990s because of its central role in the transition process in former Communist countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and more recently because of large-scale land investments in developing countries. This paper documents the existence of large variations in land institutions (markets and regulation) using current and historical data from Western and Eastern Europe. It then offers some hypotheses to explain these differences and draws implications for the role of land institutions in development (with reference to the current debate on large scale land acquisitions).

No abstract