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Understanding socioeconomic consequences of natural disasters both locally and nationally is critical in assessing and informing mitigation strategies to combat future catastrophic threats. We develop a state-level computable general equilibrium model and assess the vulnerability of state and US national economies to surge events affecting coastal communities and strategic industrial assets including petroleum and chemical manufacturing in the south-eastern region of Texas. In addition to enumerating these impacts, our model also assesses loss avoidance associated with one kind of adaptation strategy, a storm surge suppression system, that has been proposed for the region to address growing concerns over storm surge inundation. Our results indicate persistent and adverse long-term impacts of storm surge events on the economies of Texas and the USA without the surge suppression system. Importantly, while neighboring states may temporarily benefit from substitution effects and reallocation of resources, the majority of states will suffer welfare losses as a result of surge-induced impacts in Texas. Adjusting impacts by storms’ return probabilities, the average annualized decline in Texas Gross State Product is approximately 0.05% in 2066, corresponding to $5 billion, while welfare and personal income will decline by 0.05% and 0.04%, respectively. Model simulations with the storm suppression system indicate moderation in negative impacts. Our research provides a modeling framework for assessing economic impacts of disasters and further contributes to estimating ripple effects on national and regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International trade of commodities causes an international water flow in virtual form. This study focuses on the virtual water flow related to international crop trade. We build complex networks of virtual water trade (Virtual Water Trade Networks, VWTNs hereafter) with annual data of trade and its virtual water content from 1986 to 2013 among all countries. By analyzing the temporal characteristics and spatial homogeneity of the VWTNs, we find that trade networks display a feature of scale-free. This suggests those core export and import countries play dominant roles in international virtual water flows. However, the structure of the VWTN becomes more heterogeneous with time, indicating that virtual water trade has been getting more globalized. By spatially recoding the trade volumes and using detrended fluctuation analysis, this study finds that geographical distance becomes less binding in international virtual water trades. Other important findings from our VWTNs analysis include that virtual water trade patterns remain relative stable within trading groups and that geopolitical, political, and economic environments can significantly influence world virtual water trade flows. This study provides an understanding of the international water trade and its relationship with the macro social and economical conditions at the global scale. Its method thus can be applied to analyze the temporal and spatial dynamics of other networks with directed trade flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the moderating effects of entrepreneurial activity on the impact of trade penetration. Entrepreneurs may help to mitigate adverse trade shocks through several mechanisms, i.e., more flexible output structure, diversified economic portfolio, and higher knowledge spillovers from trade-induced R&D activities. Our empirical work embeds the analysis of entrepreneurship, measured using self-employment rates, into a framework of international trade and local labor markets. The empirical results show that the marginal impacts of Chinese import penetration on job losses are dampened in localities with higher self-employment rates, which suggests self-employment or entrepreneurial activities can mitigate the adverse impacts of trade penetration from low-income countries. Our study provides a novel perspective on entrepreneurs' benefits on economic well-being: Besides their direct contribution to economic growth documented in earlier research, they can also enhance the resilience of a local economy in the face of external shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]