This builds up a knowledge profile of the area, and enables underwriting and pricing of risks. Insurers and governments are also able to detect droughts and floods, and their potential impact on harvests early, enabling a quicker response. And in the event of a disaster, the before and after images allow insurers to perform loss assessment and support quicker release of claims to the affected farmers. No need to send loss surveyors to inspect damages in-person, which can be costly and time consuming. Big data analytics is at the core of Singapore’s own Natural Catastrophe Data Analytics Exchange (Nat Cat DAX). Nat Cat DAX is led by ICRM, in partnership with MAS and the industry. It will aggregate a variety of data sources including economic loss and exposure data as well as drone and satellite data to create a comprehensive database of Asia Pacific natural catastrophe risk. The consortium has commenced industry data collection efforts in Taiwan and Jakarta, and is also using satellite imagery to extract information on building features. I understand a more detailed update of its preliminary findings will be shared later in this conference. Product innovation Second, product innovation. We are seeing new forms of insurance products and solutions, such as index-based and parametric insurance. Unlike traditional insurance which indemnifies actual losses, parametric insurance solutions make pay-outs based on catastrophe events hitting certain pre-defined parameters such as hurricane wind speed or earthquake magnitude. This removes the need for loss adjusters to survey the extent of losses.
It is the direction of travel and likely destination of interest rates, rather than the precise timing of any move, that matters for their decisions and hence for the fortunes of the economy. Creating Institutional Spokes  Let me conclude by discussing briefly one or two areas where it might be possible to make progress in lifting the barriers to productivity growth. These suggestions very much go with the grain of proposals in the Government’s excellent white paper on industrial policy. Indeed, one strand of that plan involves investigating the scope for improving performance among the long tail of under-performing UK companies. These proposals complement various excellent private sector initiatives underway. These include Jurgen Maier’s Made Smarter proposals, which aim to improve digitization across UK businesses. As the earlier evidence on penetration rates of different technologies made clear, this is huge scope for improvement among UK companies here. A second initiative is Sir Charlie Mayfield and Tony Danker’s Be the Business movement. Their important and exciting initiatives are focussed on lifting the long tail. One structural solution to the long tail problem I sometimes hear mooted is simply to lop it off. This, it could be argued, solves the UK’s productivity problem at source and at a stroke. For economic historians, this could be thought of as an act of Schumpeterian creative destruction. 54  For horror film-watchers, it could be  thought of as an act of systematic zombie-slaying. I believe such an approach is probably wrong-headed.