The trade consequences of climate change driven disasters in nature: an Econometrical Approach - The People’s Republic of Bangladesh case.

The trade consequences of climate change driven disasters in nature: an Econometrical Approach - The People’s Republic of Bangladesh case. This work was realized at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. It aimed to investigate the possible existence of correlations between extreme natural events, namely those whose intensity is particularly significant, and an actual variation of the economical performances of a Country. Even though the idea at the basis of this research was to draw a path which could actually be used to evaluate the situation of every territory, we started by evaluating a very specific and peculiar case, that of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The reasons beyond this choice can be easily understood: Bangladesh is one among the countries which are the most affected by floods and inundations, which are very likely to be induced or at least amplified by the so-called Climate Change. Then, we wanted to start verifying whether their presence, which has been significantly increasing in the last decades, can be linked to a variation in the imports and exports of that country, keeping in mind that it is one among the most booming economies of the world. Needless to say, the results of such researches, which must obviously be detailed in the future, can be of greatest help in understanding one of the most challenging and difficult situations the world will have to face in the next 10 to 50 years: indeed, no industrially developed and globalized society has ever faced this kind of situations threatening their industrial role. Starting from the state of the art of the research in this field, that of the IFO Institute in Munich, Germany, we adopted a different strategy, strongly empirically oriented. The choice of the proper data to use has been one of the most difficult, long and delicate parts of the projects, due to an actual significant inaccuracy of data in econometrical sciences, whose analysis plays a fundamental role in the report. After different considerations, the most reliable available to me were defined to be the UN COMTRADE database, as for the trade data of Bangladesh, and the EM-DAT database, as for the extreme events. However, the analysis conducted hereby apparently showed an ostensible absence of correlation between the strength of an extreme event and the immediate export of typical commodities, even in a lagged model. This shows us a very important result: contrarily to previous policies, now a lot of industries are able to stock their products even in great quantities, so to supply eventual lack of production during specific crisis. That can be even enhanced since the most parte of this environmental natural events can be forecasted.