Transfer for Disasters: Governmental Responsiveness to Typhoon Risks in China

Natural disasters bring significant economic damages globally. Governmental-initiated disaster reliefs, especially disaster relief transfers from the central government to local regions, play an important role of reducing damage and help economic recovery for local regions. We use typhoon disaster in China as an example to analyze the responsiveness of central government for local disaster exposures and potential factors impacting central government's transfer efforts. By exploiting both geographic and year-to-year variations of typhoon exposure at the county level, we find that the central government responds to the current year typhoon exposure by increasing targeting transfers to local regions. Transfer efforts seem to be driven by local vulnerability, instead of political connection and governmental efficiency.