Browsing by Author "Alam, Rafat"

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    Household level FireSmart adaptation cost analysis: private property risk mitigation in the wildland-urban interface
    (2018) Arychuk, Ryan; Alam, Rafat
    The effects of global climate change are increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires in North America. The continued growth of wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities are placing more and more homes and businesses in regions where wildfires are a common occurrence. Without incentives and cost offsets from private insurers and government, homeowners have little incentive to invest in FireSmart adaptations to their property. In densely built neighbourhoods, a classic free rider problem develops where neighbours benefit from the FireSmart adaptations of their neighbours, but, in turn, place their neighbours at risk by remaining susceptible to fire. A cost analysis of FireSmart’s homeowner recommendations was conducted to estimate the compliance costs faced by the average homeowner in Fort McMurray, Alberta. This study determined that, over the lifecycle of a home, FireSmart’s recommended adaptations cost approximately 4% of average property value. If levels of government were to include fire-resistant adaptations within current home renovation rebate programs and if insurers were to include wildfire risk in their actuarial calculations, homeowners would benefit from increased awareness and financial incentives to carry out fire resistant adaptations on their property.
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    Productivity attributable to offshoring in selected countries
    (2019) Decuir-Herrera, D. Victoria; Colonescu, Constantin; Alam, Rafat
    The term offshoring refers to the process when firms decide to manufacture products abroad to reduce costs and to produce more efficiently. In the field of economics, offshoring is not a new topic, however, the rapid increase in offshoring induced by the incentive of creating a more efficient production, technological changes, and competition to reduce costs has been globally overlooked. Nonetheless, the rate of change in productivity is different among countries due to their uniqueness and resources, as well as between the different sectors of the economy. Although there are many published studies about inward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), there are not many available studies that focus on the relationship between outward FDI and productivity, additionally, much less in sectors of the economy other than manufacturing and services. For this reason, in an effort to explain the phenomenon of the latter, a multiple linear regression was created to determine the outward FDI of the sectors of the economy that significantly influence productivity. To measure productivity attributable to offshoring, the model used data on outward FDI per sector of the economy and compared to each country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per hour worked. It was found that, in general, there is a distinctively higher productivity in the manufacturing and services sector than other sectors of the economy. This paper presents an alternative way to measure the productivity of offshoring.