Exposure data available to developers of earthquake loss models are often very crudely aggregated spatially, and in such cases very considerable effort can be required to refine the geographical resolution of the building stock inventory. The influence of the geographical resolution of the exposure data for the Sea of Marmara region in Turkey is explored using several different levels of spatial aggregation to estimate the losses due to a single earthquake scenario. The results show that the total damage over an urban area, expressed as a mean damage ratio (MDR), is rather insensitive to the spatial resolution of the exposure data if a sufficiently large number of ground-motion simulations are used. However, the variability of the MDR estimates does reduce as the spatial resolution becomes higher, reducing the number of simulations required, although there appears to be a law of diminishing returns in going to very high exposure data resolution. This is largely due to the inherent and irreducible spatial variability of ground motion, which suggests that if only mean MDR estimates are needed, the effort required to refine the spatial definition of exposure data is not justified.
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This paper investigates the prospective application of arbitration by Transnational Private Regulation (TPR). It builds on the study of TPR developed by Fabrizio Cafaggi et al. TPR addresses the ever-increasing transfer of regulatory power from national to global levels, and from public to private regulators. TPR entails private regulatory co-operation be-yond the jurisdictional boundaries of States through voluntary standards. The regimes of TPR are built by a variety of actors, such as companies, NGOs, independent experts, and epistemic communities. Examples of TPR can be found in food safety, forestry management, trade, and derivatives, among other fields. More specifically, they concern private actors engaging in transnational coordination of standard setting such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that was developed to foster responsible management of the world’s forests. There are four main characteristics of TPR: legitimacy, quality, effectiveness, and enforcement. I will describe those four characteristics in brief here. First, the legitimacy of TPR is built around consent through voluntary entry, participation, and exit of regulated entities. Important to this contribution is that the legitimacy of TPR goes beyond its legal dimension, measured by purely legal standards. Hence, the legitimacy of TPR is largely determined by standards developed by social and economic institutions relevant to specific TPR regimes. The role of those institutions in standard settings is higher in private TPR regimes than private-public TPR regimes, where some forms of compliance are mandatory. Second, the quality of TPR corresponds to the ex ante and ex post evaluation cycle of regulatory processes. It is also linked with the transparency of TPR. Third, the effectiveness of TPR is measured according to the extent to which the objectives of TPR (or selected TPR regimes) are met. And finally, enforcement of TPRis understood as ‘ensuring compliance with commitments’. Enforcement of TPR can take place through courts, administrative agencies, and private dispute resolution—including the arbitration at the core of this contribution. Cafaggi’s study identified rather selective use of arbitration in TPR, but also recommended changes to make arbitration law more adaptable to TPR. Furthermore, the study recommended that more specialized dispute resolution institutions are created to exclusively serve TPR. Against this background, I shift the main focus of analysis from TPR to arbitration. Whereas Cafaggi argued that arbitration may be suitable for TPR as a means of private enforcement, in this paper I go even further, arguing that arbitration as a means of informal, out-of-court dispute resolution is well suited to strengthen the normativity of TPR. This is so because private arbitration actors (including, inter alia, arbitrators and arbitral institutions) are already equipped with the tools necessary to facilitate cross-border TPR, which is done through informal standards and procedures with origins in the communitarian values and reputational mechanisms used by different communities before the development of modern States. The roots of most private justice regimes—including arbitration—are informed by communitarian values such as collaboration, participation, and personal trust. Those values, together with other core characteristics of arbitration correspond to all core characteristics of TPR, making both systems comparable and complementary. The analytical framework incorporated in this paper follows the four core characteristics of TPR. Hence, the paper is organized into five sections. The first section contains the introduction. In the second section, I analyze the legitimacy of arbitration vis-à-vis the legitimacy of TPR. In the third section, I investigate the accountability of arbitration as a means of quality signaling vis-à-vis TPR. In the fourth section, I focus on the remedies available to arbitrators in a view of TPR’s effectiveness. Finally, in the fifth section, I analyze enforcement through arbitration and its impact on the exclusiveness versus complementarity of TPR regimes. Conclusions follow, including recommendations for future research. Part of topic "The blurring distinction between public and private in international dispute resolution"
MULTIFILE
The article engages with the recent studies on multilevel regulation. The starting point for the argument is that contemporary multilevel regulation—as most other studies of (postnational) rulemaking—is limited in its analysis. The limitation concerns its monocentric approach that, in turn, deepens the social illegitimacy of contemporary multilevel regulation. The monocentric approach means that the study of multilevel regulation originates in the discussions on the foundation of modern States instead of returning to the origins of rules before the nation State was even created, which is where the actual social capital underlying (contemporary) rules can be found, or so I wish to argue. My aim in this article is to reframe the debate. I argue that we have an enormous reservoir of history, practices, and ideas ready to help us think through contemporary (social) legitimacy problems in multilevel regulation: namely all those practices which preceded the capture of law by the modern State system, such as historical alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices.
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