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World wide, the gross national product (GNP) has been and still is the basic accounting concept and the dominant societal goal and performance indicator. As the concept is full of flaws and deficiencies, national and international committees are searching for alternatives. A view in retrospect may help in this search. The purpose of this paper is to present such a view in retrospect, by looking at the early attempts made to get out of the impasse and to break the deadlock of outmoded concepts.

This paper deliberately looks at the early attempts made to get out of the impasse of the flawed GNP concept, and to improve and extend traditional accounting. Several of these early attempts are presented in some detail.

Both the “Growth and Distribution Index” and the “Net National Welfare Index” were useful conceptual innovations. Over time, however, they got lost or were forgotten. The time has come to reactivate such initiatives or to start and implement similar ones.

The traditional GNP concept neglects significant distributive and environmental effects of economic growth. The time has come to either supplement or replace the concept – to go beyond GNP.

The conceptual deficiencies of the traditional GNP concept are on the agenda again. A view in retrospect – as presented in this paper – could help, so that in due course a breakthrough becomes possible in the search for new development indicators.

Significant amount of pollution can be generated in one region but its output is used directly and indirectly for providing final goods in other areas. Pollution of an upstream area may be carried downstream and air pollution generated in one area may be diffused to other areas. An integrated interregional input‐output and linear programming model has been presented through which responsibility for cleaning pollution can be established and optimum relocation of industries can be achieved in the framework of technological and economic constraints.

Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a technical recession doesn’t mean that citizens and local governments were not subject to some of the measures associated with post-GFC austerity. In particular, intergovernmental grants – an important source of revenue for Australian local governments – were frozen by the federal government seeking to mitigate large deficits over the forward estimates. This chapter compares and contrasts the budgetary outcomes for the local governments of Australia’s two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria. We find that the disparate regulatory controls in the two municipal jurisdictions were strongly associated with the budgetary outcomes of the individual municipalities: In particular, we present evidence which suggests that taxation limitations and lax investment guidelines in New South Wales can be associated with relatively inferior budgetary positions and higher budgetary volatility. By way of contrast, Victorian councils had the flexibility to vary rates of taxation to the changing conditions and largely avoided investment losses associated with the financial failure of Lehman Brothers. In New South Wales the regulatory response to deteriorating municipal budgets (subsequent to the GFC) has been to execute a radical programme of forced amalgamations. Somewhat ironically, the Victorian state government has recently imposed taxation limitations on its municipalities. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the saliency of regulatory constraints on municipal resilience, in the context of post-GFC economic challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the dynamics of the evolution of damage to the residential buildings within the city walls of Norcia during the six-month seismic swarm that hit Central Italy in the period 24th August 2016 to end of January 2019. This is accomplished by comparing the damage recorded by the Italian Civil Protection usability form (AEDES form) during this period after each event.

First, these outputs are compared with a qualitative assessment conducted by means of omnidirectional camera (ODC) imagery collected on site by the authors, to explore the ability of this technology to support post-earthquake damage assessment. The damage level attributed with these two techniques is then further compared with the output of the analytical vulnerability assessment method FaMIVE, which allows to correlate damage to vulnerability. Specifically, the objective is to investigate the efficacy and performance of historic and recent strengthening interventions.

Results show that there is a good correspondence between AeDES and ODC assessments for low to medium damage grades (DG). Discrepancies in higher DGs are discussed in light of the different levels of information that can be recorded by using the two tools. The efficacy of strengthening is also well captured by the FaMIVE method. The procedure estimates a decrease of almost 40, 25 and 20 per cent of the total number of buildings failing out-of-plane, respectively, for the three seismic events considered, when restraining elements are in action.

The analysis conducted in this work make use of deterministic values of Norcia’s masonry fabric characteristics that have been found in literature, thus implying that neither the probabilistic aspects nor the related uncertainties have been properly investigated and addressed. However, this limitation is to be considered within the more general context of the legislation for the preservation of historic buildings which limits substantially any type of semi-destructive tests, hence limiting the reliability of the values available in literature. This in turn affects the decisions informing the design and implementation of strengthening interventions which can be confidently considered reliable and effective.

The paper addresses for the first time a systematic investigation of damage progression in historic masonry structures, part of urban aggregates in heritage cities. The current urban fabric is discussed in view of historic building codes as the basis for determining the present seismic vulnerability of the historic city centre of Norcia. The study provides new data sets for the city of Norcia and develops a statistical correlation between cumulative damage and analytical vulnerability functions for heritage buildings exposed to a swarm of earthquakes. The analytical assessment of the effect of historic strengthening is totally novel.