Economy Archives - Polycrisis

‘History will tell’: as US pressure grows, Cuba edges closer to collapse amid mass exodus

The author examines Cuba’s ongoing polycrisis, characterized by the convergence of economic collapse, demographic decline, social fragmentation, and political repression. Mass emigration is accelerating population loss and weakening public institutions, while economic contraction across nearly all sectors has deepened inequality and eroded the foundations of Cuba’s once-renowned healthcare and education systems. Despite widespread disillusionment, internal

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Mapping the Hope Attractor: A Conversation with Thomas- Homer Dixon

In this conversation, Thomas Homer-Dixon introduces the Cascade Institute’s Polycrisis Core Model (PCM), a novel framework designed to map and analyse interactions among 11 critical global systems, each with multiple potential future states. The model employs cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis to evaluate over four million internally consistent scenarios, ultimately identifying 11 distinct “attractor” states. These

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Nature and Biodiversity Loss: A Research Agenda for Financial Economics

The authors outline a research agenda to deepen understanding of the economic and financial consequences of nature and biodiversity loss, emphasizing that ecosystem degradation and climate change are intertwined through a “Twin-Crises Multiplier.” They introduce a model in which ecosystem services are direct inputs to economic production, and their loss amplifies both environmental and financial

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Global Systemic Stresses: Understanding the Drivers of Polycrisis

This report introduces the Cascade Institute’s Stress-Trigger-Crisis model, a systemic framework that distinguishes between slow-moving stresses that erode the resilience of global systems and fast-moving trigger events that precipitate crises. It identifies 14 global systemic stresses that affect nine vital systems: climate, ecology, food, energy, economy, infrastructure, health, social order and governance, and world order.

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Cascading Failure, Financial Network and Systemic Risk

This paper addresses the challenge of accurately measuring systemic risk by introducing a novel indicator, Expected Shortfall Rank (ESRank), which accounts for cascading failures and network effects often overlooked in traditional models. Using LASSO to construct tail risk networks among financial institutions and ΔCoES to simulate contagion dynamics, the study develops a general cascading failure

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Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations: Intertwined Crises, Multiple Vulnerabilities

This report examines the complex and compounding challenges facing economies in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS). It highlights how overlapping crises—such as armed conflict, institutional fragility, climate-related disasters, commodity price volatility, and global economic shocks—interact to deepen poverty, food insecurity, and deficits in human development across FCS economies. The report calls for targeted, sequenced policy

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