Congratulations to the 2022 finalists
The first-prize for the 2022 Risk Prize was awarded to Rob Glew at the Risk Summit on 22 June 2022.
First place finalist
Rob Glew, PhD candidate, Manufacturing Engineering, University of Cambridge
The failure to effectively manage risks in development aid is a barrier to helping the fragile states that need it most. Failures, such the case study of Afghanistan in this essay, occur when risk management fails to achieve flexibility, transparency, and efficiency. In Afghanistan, perhaps 22 million people are at risk of falling into extreme suffering now that support for resilient farming, educational equality, and child malnutrition has been withdrawn after the rise of the insurgent Taliban government. This essay examines why leading development organisations failed to adapt their risk management approaches to this new context. Building on current best practice and taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the tools of systems engineering are applied to bureaucracy. The result is a new modular approach to risk management in development aid.
Honourable mentions
Shan Liu, MBA candidate, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
Huimin Bao Insurance is probably the group insurance product with the largest number of participants. This insurance product involves insurance companies, government, technology company and millions of residents, forming an ecosystem. As the actuary who designed and conducted pricing for Huimin Bao Insurance, I observed risks of this ecosystem from and formulated potential solutions to tackle the risks.
Aditya Panse, M.St (History), Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge
As we look back at the last decade and a half, humankind has experienced a financial crisis, a pandemic, inadequate responses to climate change, two situations that could have escalated into a war but didn’t, and one which did. We do live in the proverbial ‘interesting times’. It is up to us to try not to make it more ‘interesting’ by squabbling over international tax rights. It is in our interests to come up with a frictionless and speedy system of resolution of international tax disputes.
The current international tax dispute resolution mechanism known as Mutual Agreement Procedure (‘MAP’) is inherently inefficient in the sense that it does not always culminate into a resolution of disputes that is acceptable to the parties. This creates significant business risks to Multinational Entities (i.e., the taxpayers) because the taxpayers cannot be certain of the tax treatment of a particular aspect of their business model in a particular country. This paper proposes a solution for reducing the friction in the MAP process. The paper begins by describing the current MAP process, pointing out the issues, and the resultant bottlenecks. The paper then describes the risks to international commerce and proposes a measure to address those risks and make the process more efficient.
