[This post first appeared on World Bank Blogs on June 3.] A recent blog by Stéphane Hallegatte and Stephen Hammer has already generated debate about how to undertake pandemic recovery stimulus packages in ways that support ongoing momentum toward a decarbonized world. This piece builds on that analysis, focusing on the role of the power sector. Governments […]

As New Zealand implements further relaxation of lockdown restrictions it is timely to consider what optimal pandemic response strategies are, in light of experience in the antipodes, and how they might be evaluated.   NZ has suspended the normal process of quality evaluation of regulatory impositions via its Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) process for the […]

Clive Harrison has updated his spreadsheet-based pandemic model that was posted on this blog on April 22. I had a problem with the daily mortality data for Sweden last week, it became very irregular and it looked as though there was a weekly dip in daily deaths. This didn’t make any sense and then I […]

Governments around the world are shutting down businesses to slow the COVID-19 pandemic, while simultaneously trying to maintain employment and prevent widespread business bankruptcies. This post contrasts government responses in the five countries in which Castalia has offices: the USA, Australia, New Zealand, France and Colombia. Government responses fall into two main categories: business continuity […]

Clive Harrison is an old friend and a water sector professional with a fine gasp of modelling that get to the essence of complex problems even when the data is poor. While stuck in Poland because of travel restrictions due to COVID-19, he turned to modeling to understand the pandemic. The result was an easy-to-use […]