Study: US cities have worse inequality than Mexico, with rich and poor living side by side

Skid Row in Los Angeles, a city where rich and poor live in very close proximity – for better and for worse.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The cities of the Americas are unequal places.

US census data and recent American Community Surveys show that in most modern American metropolises, resources are unevenly distributed across the city – think New York City’s lower Manhattan versus the South Bronx – with residents enjoying unequal access to jobs, transportation and public space.

In 2014, New York City’s GINI inequality index was 0.48, meaning that income distribution was less even in New York City than in the US as a whole (0.39). It was also higher than the most unequal OECD countries, Chile (0.46) and Mexico (0.45).

Latin America, which is the world’s most unequal place, is also by far the most urbanised region of the globe. More than 80% of its population lives in large cities.

Between 1950 and 2005, the region’s big cities grew precipitously. Both Mexico City and Sao Paulo jumped from just under three million people to, in both cases, nearly 19 million.

Data on urban inequality is largely unavailable, but it is clear that this rapid urbanisation has been far from equitable. According to a 2012 UN Habitat report, the large majority of Latin America’s non-poor population lives in major metro areas, while the poorest live in rural areas.

What does inequality look like?

No matter where you live, measuring inequality is tricky, because its incidence and extent changes in different parts of the city.

Sure, there are rich neighbourhoods and poor ones: high-income and low-income households sort themselves across cities according to preference (for local public goods and neighbourhood composition) and needs (according to budget, job location and housing prices).

But not every neighbourhood is comprised fully of households with the same income. Income sorting across space is often “imperfect”, meaning that rich and poor households might live in the same neighbourhood and share common social ties and local amenities.

As a result, a very specific and local kind of inequality emerges within neighbourhoods. This phenomenon is sizeable in US metro areas, Census Bureau data shows. Not only do unequal households live very close together, but neighbourhoods also represent small communities where local inequality, on average, seems to track overall urban inequality.

For example, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles all have neighbourhood income inequality at least 20% larger than Washington’s, which matches the difference in the cities’ GINI indices. We found that inequality within individual neighbourhoods has also been rising precipitously over the past 35 years (even in very small neighbourhoods), indicating an increase of income heterogeneity at the community level.

This unexpected finding is likely related to the comeback of North American cities over the past decade – the so-called great inversion. Across the Americas, jobs and firms are moving back into major metro areas, attracting more skilled people, who are generally young, receive higher wages and prefer to settle down where their jobs are.

As high-income young couples buy up homes in historically distressed neighbourhoods long dominated by the working and renting class – and gentrify them – they push up income heterogeneity in those places. This is happening in cities across the Americas.

Gentrification has occurred in many North American cities, increasing local income inequality and, in some cases, tensions.
Michael Premo/flickr, CC BY-ND

Keeping up with the Joneses

We wanted to better understand this phenomenon. Why is local income inequality rising? How can we quantify it? What are the trends in uber-localised inequality? And what does it all mean for city dwellers?

Those were the questions driving our study – So close yet so unequal: Reconsidering spatial inequality in US cities – which focused on US cities. Our preliminary findings were recently published in a Catholic University of Milan Working Paper.

Unlike traditional assessments of inequality, which accept administrative partitions of the city as the unit of analysis and measure income inequality in those neighbourhoods, we look at inequality among neighbours, putting people at the centre of our analysis.

The underlying thought experiment consists of asking individuals to compare their income with that of neighbours living within a given distance range (from few blocks to entire census areas), thus quantifying income inequality in that particular person’s neighbourhood.

In doing so for every person in a city – any city – one should be able to measure two aspects of spatial inequality: the average income inequality within individual neighbourhoods (is my neighbour richer than me?), and inequality among the average incomes of each neighbourhood (is that neighbourhood richer than mine?).

We found that these two indices define a typology of cities that mirrors what urban planners have found at the city level. Some places are “even cities”. Like Washington DC, they display relatively low income inequality everywhere.

Other metro areas, among them Miami and San Francisco, show high urban inequality, but high and low-income households are rather evenly distributed throughout the city. These are so-called “mixed cities”.

The largest US metro areas also have the most unequal neighbourhoods. In New York and Los Angeles, the way high and low-income households are distributed across the urban footprint reflects what planners call the “unstable city” model.

The Great Gatsby in the ‘hood

Such substantial and increasing inequality appears to imply several contradictory things for cities and their residents.

As shown in Figure 1, lower neighbourhood inequality is associated, on average, with large upward mobility gains for young people who grew up in poor families, a phenomenon reported in recent work by Stanford University’s Raj Chetty.

FIGURE 1: Upward mobility in America’s urban neighbourhoods

Upward mobility gains/losses for children living in poor families in 2000, by Commuting Zone.

Children of better-off families benefit, too, from living in a homogenous local community, thanks to “positive contagion” facilitated by social interaction among wealthy young peers.

Both findings are evidence of a “Great Gatsby Curve” in America’s neighbourhoods. That is, greater income inequality in one generation amplifies the consequences of having rich or poor parents for the economic status of the next generation.

Yet greater income inequality within individual neighbourhoods may actually be a good thing for poorer locals. Figure 2 shows that they experience life expectancy gains, perhaps due to positive health modelling and increased aspirations among poor adult residents.

FIGURE 2: Life expectacy in America’s urban neighbourhoods

Addressing inequality

For policy makers, then, our findings create an intergenerational trade-off. A “mixed city” model would seem to promote life expectancy gains for poor adults who live there, while the “even city” ideal furthers economic mobility of young people who grow up poor.

Lessons learned from such a policy debate in the US could have important international consequences.

No one has yet applied our neighbourhood-based inequality analysis to Latin America’s unequal cities. But we can see that in metropolises such as Mexico City, and São Paulo in Brazil, as well as in smaller cities, uncontrolled sprawl and lack of urban planning has increased the distances between high, middle and low-income households.

The view from the Rocinha favela, in Rio de Janeiro, where ‘urban renewal’ is now encroaching on some of the poorest parts of the city.
AHLN/flickr, CC BY

This is the “polarised city” model, and our paper found little evidence of it in US cities (with the exception of Detroit and Washington). Such places have substantial heterogeneity in income across neighbourhoods and relatively little heterogeneity within neighbourhoods.

In Latin America’s polarised cities, the poor are separated from the rest of the population. As a result, they have lower access and opportunities for education, employment and services. This inequality has been exacerbated by gentrification and by the region’s growing global economic engagement. This has strengthened urban elites’ connections to the world while relegating Latin America’s poor further into the periphery.

In such cases, increasing the urban income mix seen in New York City might actually have beneficial effects for the city’s neediest residents. This is a relevant area for future study. It would be interesting, for example, to plot cities across the Americas on the same graph, examining regional trends in longevity and mobility based on neighbourhood-level inequality.

Such hyper-local analysis would offer both policymakers and international agencies the kind of information they need to improve the lives of today’s city dwellers, both now and in the future.

Eugenio Peluso, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Verona and Francesco Andreoli, Post-doctoral researcher, Luxemburg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How Trump's harsh education cuts undermine his economic growth goals

A student learns to operate a mill in an advanced precision machining class.
AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

The Trump administration has some ambitious goals that include trillions in tax cuts, a significant military buildup and a fresh investment in infrastructure.

The White House released details of how it plans to pay for it all in its full budget request for fiscal year 2018: by slashing spending on pretty much everything else, but also by boosting economic growth enough to generate more than US$2 trillion in new revenue over a decade.

What the president’s team is failing to consider is that many of its spending cuts, such as reduced investment in welfare and education, will actually impede the administration’s ability to achieve its target growth rate of 3 percent, up from about 2 percent today.

My own research focuses on how career and technical education (CTE) has implications for growth by promoting educational attainment, training and productivity. Trump’s proposed cuts to CTE offer an illustrative example of the economic consequences of reducing social spending.

Taking an ax to education

The administration’s budget seeks to slash spending on the Education Department by $9.2 billion, or 13.5 percent, which is the biggest proposed cut since President Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully tried to gut the agency in the 1980s.

In K-12 education, the administration would like to eliminate at least four distinct programs – including Title II grants for teacher and principal training and programs designed to help lower-income students transition to college – and make significant reductions to many others. On the other hand, there’s a big investment in a few programs to support school choice and vouchers, an articulated priority of Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The higher education budget faces severe cuts as well. Trump wants to eliminate subsidized student loans as well as a loan forgiveness program, and slash federal work study spending in half. These changes would substantially undermine efforts to help lower-income Americans attain a college degree, which would be a further drag on economic and productivity growth.

Of particular concern to me, however, is the $168 million, or 15 percent, reduction in block grants to states, called Perkins funding, which are used to support career and technical education in high schools and community college. Given the administration’s preference for funding programs that promote economic growth, the cut to CTE – which disproportionately benefits Trump’s base of largely white working-class voters – is bewildering.

CTE, also known as vocational education, exposes youth to practical, hands-on skills as a complement to academic coursework. Historically, CTE has included programs like auto mechanics and cosmetology but increasingly also includes high-growth industries such as information technology and health services.

By supporting these kinds of career paths, CTE tends to train students for positions that could support small business growth, and that fill demand in the high growth fields of health services, information technology and advanced manufacturing.

How CTE helps the economy

Though CTE is on Trump’s list of cuts, it is the area of education spending that my research suggests has the most potential to boost economic growth. These benefits would be realized through better-paying jobs and fewer dropouts, which also help achieve other positive economic and social outcomes.

Career Academies, which began about 35 years ago, are one such approach to providing CTE in high school by integrating career pathways into the school curriculum. They boast some of the best evidence on the effectiveness of CTE. A 2008 report on the program suggests it can help students earn 11 percent more in wages compared with their peers.

My own recent work using data from Arkansas shows that students who took more CTE courses in high school were more likely to be employed and earn more money – about 3 percent to 5 percent – than their peers who took fewer. Furthermore, I also found these students were more likely to finish high school and go on to college, both of which improve job prospects.

Evidence from Massachusetts shows similar educational benefits of CTE. Specifically, I found that students enrolled in vocational programs were significantly more likely to graduate from high school and attain industry-recognized certificates in specialized fields like IT.

Increasing high school graduation is critical; there is ample evidence that higher levels of educational attainment result in higher wages and better long-term employment prospects.

Studies show that a high school graduate will earn 50 percent to 100 percent more in lifetime earnings than high school dropouts and will be less likely to draw on welfare or get tangled up in the criminal justice system. The graduate’s higher earnings also mean she’ll pay more in taxes.

Beyond improving individual outcomes, investment in education and training fuels broader economic growth by bolstering productivity. The decreased demand for social services and welfare also frees up more state and federal resources to be invested in other areas of the economy.

Ideology over sound policy

The Trump administration has claimed the high price tag of its tax cuts will pay for themselves through higher economic growth. A budget that aims to gut important social programs – which not only improve individual lives directly but also boost the economy – would make that a lot less achievable.

In the end, the Trump budget, it seems, is motivated more by ideology than sound, evidence-based policy. In education, the administration is clearly prioritizing school choice at the expense of bedrock areas like CTE that are known to promote achievement and a variety of economic benefits.

As a result, education development will suffer, as will the administration’s rosy economic growth projections.

Shaun M. Dougherty, Assistant Professor of Education & Public Policy, University of Connecticut

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Everyday chemicals may affect brain development, including foetal IQ

Disruption of the thyroid hormones can prevent tadpoles from becoming frogs.
Coffee/Pixabay

All vertebrates – from frogs and birds to human beings – require the same thyroid hormone to thrive. Every stage of brain development is modulated by thyroid hormone and, over millions of years, the structure of this critical hormone has remained unchanged.

But, increasingly, the trappings of modern life are preventing it from playing its critical role in human brain development. Thyroid hormone signalling is very vulnerable to interference by chemicals that can scramble the endocrine communication routes between cells.

These endocrine disruptors, as they are called, include ubiquitous chemicals such as pesticides, plastifiers, flame retardants and surfactants, all of which are found in our food, non-stick pans, furniture, cleaning products, clothes and cosmetics. They are even found in the air we breath and the water we drink.

This is bad news for our brains, and children’s brains in particular. Thyroid hormone serves multiple functions in orchestrating the production and differentiation of the 100 billion cells that make up the human brain. Without the right amount of thyroid hormone at the right time, human babies will suffer severe intellectual disabilities, developing an IQ of only about 35.

In a recent experiment, conducted on tadpoles, we tested the hypothesis that common chemicals in the environment, singly and as a mixture, can interfere with brain development in humans.

Tadpoles help scientists understand how human brains develop, as we share similar thyroid hormones.
Benny Mazur/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Previous work had showed that tadpoles with endocrine disorders couldn’t metamorphose, that is, they never become frogs. Our paper, published on March 7 in Scientific Reports, shows that young tadpoles exposed to a mixture of common chemicals at concentrations routinely found in human amniotic fluid not only modified thyroid hormone signalling but also reduced the total number and size of neurons and inhibited tadpole movement.

Even with limited exposure of three days, we observed significant effects on the tadpoles’ brain development. Tadpoles have long been used to study human developmental processes, including in the first cloning experiments back in the late 1950s because they offer important insights into how brains develop.

The autism debate

These findings raise a number of concerns.

Global chemical production has increased 300 times over the last 50 years, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Given that all of the common molecules we used in our experiment are found at similar concentrations in human amniotic fluid, one must be concerned about the potential effects of this mixture on foetal brain development.

In recent years, we have learned that small variations in a woman’s thyroid hormone levels during early pregnancy significantly impact her child’s IQ and brain structure, including the ratio of grey matter (neurons) to white matter (glia cells).

Similarly, it has been repeatedly shown in longitudinal epidemiological studies that children born to mothers with high levels of certain thyroid disrupting chemicals, such as PCBs or flame-retardants, have lower IQs. Children born to mothers exposed to pesticides or other chemicals can also display more neurodevelopmental problems.

Clean, perhaps, but not so safe.
Siyavula Education/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Might intra-uterine exposure to thyroid-disrupting chemicals, then, be linked to the apparent rise in neurodevelopmental diseases, such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?

Different data sets from Asia, Europe and North America have shown increases in autism spectrum disorders and ADHD. Today in the United States, one in 42 boys is diagnosed as on the autism spectrum.

The incidence of autism in the US increased significantly between the data sets published in 2000 and 2014. The human genome did not change during this time, nor can changed diagnosis criteria or increased awareness entirely account for the increase.

Research emphasises the genetic bases of autism spectrum disorders, but it is highly plausible that environmental factors could exacerbate genetic susceptibilities. In studies conducted on gestating rats, autism-like behaviour in offspring has been linked to disruptions in thyroid-hormone signalling, specifically hypothyroidism.

Dropping IQs

Endocrine disruption may also tell us something about the IQ decreases observed in certain populations.

Comparing IQ in different populations at different time points is, of course, not scientifically rigorous. But measuring IQ at a given time point in a given population exposed to different levels of chemicals can be meaningful.

Several data sets from around the world have shown IQ scores dropping over time. Military recruitment boards in Finland and Denmark demonstrate this decrease, and similar losses are seen in other populations, including adults in France and children in the United Kingdom.

Other data shows that reaction time in young people is slowing. This is surprising, perhaps, given that many young people today play screen games that require rapid responses.

But the speed of neuronal transmission is dependent on myelination, the formation of the lipid sheath around the neurons, which requires thyroid hormone. Thus, reaction time is vulnerable to interruption by the endocrine disruptors present in our everyday lives.

The mechanisms that may link chemical thyroid-hormone disruption with increased brain disorders and decreasing IQ are further explored in my 2017 book, Toxic Cocktail: How chemical pollution is poisoning our brains.

The takeaway

Today, chemical contamination is such that we are all exposed to hundreds of chemicals, few of which have been fully tested for their toxic effects. Little is known about their potential effects on our hormonal systems, and even less about how they act together as mixtures to have a “cocktail effect”.

Our findings showing adverse effects on tadpoles’ thyroid-hormone signalling, including reduced neuronal number and mobility, indicate the urgent need to revisit the way chemicals are tested before they hit the market.

As a cautionary tale, recall that paracetamol, the main ingredient in many painkillers, which was previously considered safe during pregnancy, is now linked to behavioural problems in children. Doctors now suggest that pregnant women avoid all medications, acknowledging the acute susceptibility of fetuses to drugs and chemicals. The concept is scientifically grounded in the developmental origin of adult disease: prenatal factors, we now know, can cause disease later in life.

In modern life, every pregnant woman is exposed to hundreds of chemicals. Not only are these chemicals found in her bloodstream but also in the amniotic fluid that surrounds her developing child.

Our tadpole experiments show that this exposure compromises the hormonal regulation that underlies brain development. Processes honed through millions of years of evolution are now very much endangered.

Barbara Demeneix, Professeur en endocrinologie, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) – Sorbonne Universités

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

What game theory says about dealing with North Korea

North Korea fired its third missile in three weeks on May 29, once again drawing protests from South Korea and Japan. Tensions have been rising in the region since the start of the year when Kim Jong-Un’s regime started a series of tests, of which this is the ninth.

National leaders attending the recent G7 meeting in Italy agreed that deterring North Korea should be a top priority, according to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but given the reclusive nation’s belligerence, options are scarce.

One way to try to choose the best way forward is by applying game theory to the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Roll of the dice

Game theory applies to conflict and cooperation within competitive situations. It posits that a cooperative outcome is possible when the game is repeated infinitely, the number of players is small and information about the game is known to all the players.

A positive outcome is when there’s reciprocalism; when there’s the option of retaliating against cheating behaviour because the game repeats infinitely. Players have little incentive to cheat if retaliation is an option and the result is cooperation.

But if the game is one-off or repeated a finite number of times, has a large number of players, and each player doesn’t know the other players’ strategy, then each will choose a “self-oriented” outcome. In this scenario, each player chooses the best solution individually rather than cooperating. The result is second-best for all.

What’s happening on the Korean peninsula is more like the latter scenario. Dealing with North Korea’s missile development and nuclear program with a pre-emptive attack would be neither easy nor desirable, and the main players will likely pursue their own self-interest.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that North Korea has announced that it intends to retaliate against any military action.



This could result in a humanitarian catastrophe as South Korea’s capital Seoul is only 60 kilometres from the border. And the 28,500 US troops based in South Korea might also bear the brunt of the North’s retaliation.

Any counter-attack by North Korea would invoke retaliation from the South, in turn, and could result in war on the Korean peninsula. Or humiliation for both the US and South Korea if they don’t react. The exact locations of North Korea’s missiles are largely unknown anyway.

A better option for constraining North Korea’s development of nuclear missiles may be to tighten current economic sanctions and impose new ones if necessary.

For this, China is pivotal. The country is North Korea’s number one trading partner. China supplies it with petroleum and imports coal, which allows North Korea to obtain foreign currency. More than 90% of the petroleum consumed in North Korea is imported from China.

North Korea’s dependence on China has increased since the UN imposed economic sanctions on the former in 2016; Japan terminated its trade relationship with the reclusive regime in 2006; and South Korea did the same on May 24 2010.

But China has been hesitant about enforcing economic sanctions and has done so half-heartedly.

China is conflicted because it doesn’t want North Korea to have nuclear weapons as the country could then become a direct threat and provide an excuse for Japan and South Korea to develop nuclear weapons.



But it also doesn’t want the North Korean regime to collapse. This would create a refugee crisis at its border and a unified Korean peninsula would likely fall under US influence. North Korea also provides the perfect buffer for avoiding direct confrontation with the US.

Shrinking range of options

Thus far, Kim Jong-Un is the only winner in this game. Apart from ongoing missile tests, his regime successfully completed its fifth nuclear test in September 2016, following others in 2006, 2009, 2013 and January 2016. This situation illustrates one of the major tensions in strategic settings: the clash between individual and group interests.

To avoid war and foster cooperation, China will need to share responsibility for a diplomatic campaign seeking a peaceful solution. Currently, it is effectively providing an umbrella for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

Stepping up requires China to join the US, South Korea, Japan and the United Nations to deliver a credible and strengthened deterrence to North Korea against any further nuclear development.

But this option is only becoming more complex for all involved except North Korea. As its nuclear development advances, North Korea will have less and less incentive to give it up, which, in turns, limits the range of action for the other side.

What game theory tells us is that self-interested individuals derive a greater payoff for opportunism. China may not want to lose its strategic partnership with North Korea or the economic benefits it derives from trade with it; under its new liberal president, South Korea may want to continue the rapprochement policy of former president Kim Dae-Jung; and the US may opt for the easy path of military action.

But it’s important to remember that these are all second-best results for the players. The better choice is cooperation among the players including China. A collectively applied and consistent non-military strategy is the best option to alleviate the tension engendered by North Korea’s nuclear and missile development programs.

Byung-Seong Min, Senior Lecturer, Department of International Business and Asian Studies, Griffith University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Two years after the earthquake, why has Nepal failed to recover?

Workers rebuild a temple damaged during the 2015 earthquake, in Bhaktapur.
Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar

Two years after the devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal, the country is struggling to bounce back. Nearly 70% of the affected people still live in temporary shelters, and it is common to see damaged houses, temples without roofs, and earthquake debris lying around, even in the capital Kathmandu.

The recovery is painfully slow, and many families who lost their loved ones continue to live in traumatic conditions.

Over the past two years, working with CARE Nepal and the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies, we have talked to local communities in the Gorkha, Kathmandu and Kavre districts, and helped to organise a national workshop involving senior government officials, researchers and civil society actors.

Devastation

The twin earthquakes that struck on April 26 and May 12, 2015 caused around 9,000 deaths, and around half a million families in the central region of the country lost their homes. As well as houses, dozens of Kathmandu’s heritage buildings were destroyed, including the iconic Dharahara tower.

In the quakes’ immediate aftermath, relief and rescue work began swiftly, with local volunteers working with the army and international aid workers. However, over the past two years the recovery effort has slowed to a crawl.

Political bickering, a lack of accountability and poor management of funds have all hampered efforts to rebuild. After two years, Nepali media have branded the situation a “failure”.

What went wrong? Our fieldwork and interviews identified four underlying problems.

1. Partisan squabbling

Immediately after the disaster, the government and opposition parties agreed to create a new public body, the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), to oversee rebuilding.

However, despite pressure from international donors and humanitarian agencies, protracted political wrangling meant it took almost nine months to appoint someone to lead the new body. The chief executive has changed three times in little over a year.

Donors pledged more than US$4 billion to the NRA, but little of the aid money has found its way into the work of rebuilding. As a result, fewer than 10% of the roughly 500,000 damaged homes have been rebuilt with support from the government and donors.

The earthquake hit at a time when Nepal was embroiled in debate over its new constitution, which became a matter of controversy. For about ten years, the disaster response agenda had been neglected by the contentious politics of state restructuring, following the decade-long violent Maoist revolt.

Disaster response has thus been sidelined by protracted political instability, characterised by constitutional transition, ideological and ethnic tension, and frequent changes of government.

2. Absence of local government

Although national parliament elections have been held in Nepal on more or less on a regular basis, there has been no local election or effective local government for 16 years.

Local elections have finally been announced for May 14 and June 14, 2017, but the damage caused by more than a decade of political vacuum is huge. The loss of political accountability to local people is one of the key factors of the failure of disaster recovery in Nepal.

In several locations, we found unaffected local elites included in the lists of victims receiving financial support. Without local democratic leadership, people cannot voice their concerns, mobilise community resources, or scrutinise projects.

Despite this, Nepalese people enjoy strong local social capital, which has helped them in times of distress and difficulty. Community leaders in Gorkha told us: “we work together at the community level to rebuild damaged houses one by one even when there is no support from the government or donors”.

Some local leaders have worked with their communities to build infrastructure, small roads, schools and hospitals. Nevertheless, these individual efforts are no substitute for strong and democratic local government.

3. Ineffective international aid

In the aftermath of the earthquakes, Nepal’s National Planning Commission estimated that the country needed more than US$7 billion for recovery. The billions of dollars committed by international donors was not translated into a clear plan to direct the money, which meant it has had little impact in rebuilding.

The NRA, which should have led the major state response to the disaster, has been hampered by cumbersome administration. A proposal to allow the NRA to bypass the standard procedures failed to eventuate, and a senior official told us their work is slowed by inefficient and lethargic regulations.

The head of the NRA recently publicly criticised the slow pace of rebuilding, blaming overly inflexible procedures and a lack of strong political will.

Donors have therefore preferred to give to international NGOs instead of state options; in Gorkha alone there were 300 different NGOs operating immediately after the earthquake.

The effectiveness of these organisations has been questioned by independent commentators and academic researchers, some even describing the post-disaster aid industry as “disaster capitalism”. However, despite challenges, several NGOs have delivered vital relief in times of need.

Nepal still lacks effective and enforceable mechanisms to monitor the use of humanitarian support. Having the money is not enough; it must reach the projects that truly help people.

4. Regional tensions

Nepal exists in a delicate balance between India and China, and a few months after the earthquakes a blockade between India and Nepal disrupted supplies. Nepal blamed India for the blockade, while India said the disruption of supplies was due to internal political problems in Nepal.

As a landlocked country, Nepal has historically relied on India for its basic supplies. India’s blockade led to almost total paralysis of not only the recovery work, but the entire economy. At the same time, in recent years China’s interest in Nepal has grown.

During the blockade, China provided free oil, but such one-off assistance did not address recovery needs. The competition between China and India for influence in Nepal has not resulted in any substantial benefit for those affected by the disaster.

Given the persistent seismic risks in the Himalayas, there is a need to create a coherent regional structure for disaster recovery. Yet internal tensions appear to have prevented the Nepal government from promoting serious international cooperation.

Since the entire Himalayas is prone to multiple forms of disaster, a region-wide research and recovery initiative, involving both China and India, is crucial.

Nepal is just one case of poor disaster recovery management. The questions we need to ask, two years on, are: how can we improve national and local government responses? How can international aid work with government efforts? And how can we foster regional cooperation?

Hemant Ojha, Lecturer, UNSW; Eileen Baldry, Professor of Criminology, UNSW, and Krishna K. Shrestha, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, UNSW

This article was originally published on The Conversation.