This book provides a tool for assessing both how prone a country is to external economic shocks - its vulnerability - as well as its ability bounce back from those shocks - its resilience. For economic planners, as well as students of the economies of small states.

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Some small states enjoy relatively high GDP per capita –giving the impression of economic strength – when in reality these economies are fragile and disproportionately affected by adverse economic shocks, natural disasters and extreme weather events. The Commonwealth resilience framework has been developed to identify both the national policies required to build resilience and the areas in which regional and international development partners can provide support. This study refines and expands the framework to cover areas such as governance, environmental management and social development. It proposes policy measures for building resilience and ways in which the resilience framework for small states can be embedded in national planning to help stakeholders to agree priority areas for policy intervention.

In the face of increasing failures, comments attributed to Albert Einstein loom large: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” There is a pervasive feeling that any attempt to make sense of the current terrain of complex systems must involve thinking outside the box and originating unconventional approaches that integrate organizational, managerial, social, political, cultural, and human aspects and their interactions. This textbook offers research-based models and tools for diagnosing and predicting the behavior of complex techno-socio-economic systems in the domain of critical infrastructures, key resources, key assets and the open bazaar of space, undersea, and below-ground systems. These models exemplify emblematic models in physics, within which the critical infrastructures, as well as society itself and its paraphernalia, share the profile of many-body systems featuring cooperative phenomena and phase transitions – the latter usually felt as disruptive occurrences. The book and its models focus on the analytics of real-life-business actors, including policy-makers, financiers and insurers, industry managers, and emergency responders.