توسعه اقتصادی و تلفات ناشی از بلایای طبیعی: نقش قرار گرفتن در معرض خطر

Our contribution is to show that the relationship between wealth and disasters is mainly formed by the exposure to disaster hazard. We first build a simple analytical model that demonstrates how countries that face a low hazard of disasters are likely to see first increasing losses and then decreasing ones with increasing economic development. At the same time, countries that face a high hazard of disasters are likely to experience first decreasing losses and then increasing ones with increasing economic development. We then use a cross-country panel dataset in conjunction with a hazard exposure index to investigate whether the data is consistent with the predictions from the model. In line with our model, we find that the relationship of losses with wealth crucially depends on the level of hazard of natural disasters faced by countries.

There are certainly few issues more disturbing than the prospect of losing one's hard-earned belongings to the forces of nature. One single instant of a wave, a tremble of the earth, or a passing by of a hurricane is often enough to destroy one's house, one's work, and one's belongings, if not one's life. Periodic news coverage, such as pictures from flooded houses in New Orleans, hurricane-torn houses in Burma, dried fields in Sub-Saharan Africa or the earthquake damages in Chengdu in China, reminds us of this possibility. Unfortunately, from a global perspective such events are a lot more frequent than one might imagine. For example, in 2007 alone there were approximately 450 of these natural disasters worldwide, affecting around 211 million people, and causing economic losses amounting to 74 billion US dollars.1

In this article we investigate the relationship between the losses from natural disasters, the exposure to different levels of natural hazard and the stages of economic development. Our main contributions are the analysis of this relationship via a theoretical model as well as through an econometric analysis of a cross country panel dataset. We find that both the theoretical model and the empirical analysis predict a non-linear relationship between economic losses and the stages of economic development and that this crucially depends on a country's hazard of natural disasters. More specifically, countries that face low or intermediate hazard have a bell-shaped relationship between economic losses and wealth; whereas countries that face high hazard have a u-shaped relationship between losses and wealth. This stands in contrast to the current literature, which has suggested losses either always decrease or, more recently, face an inverted u-shaped relationship with wealth.