The standard way in which disaster damages are measured involves examining separately the number of fatalities, of injuries, of people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. Here, we implement a novel way to aggregate these separate measures of disaster impact...

Rational allocation of limited public resources is critical to achieve the stated aims of government programmes. Here, we focus on the regional allocation of public spending for disaster risk reduction in Bangladesh as a case study to identify the rationale that guides public funding...

The standard way in which disaster damages are measured involves examining separately the number of fatalities, of injuries, of people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. Here, we propose a novel way to aggregate measures of disaster impact, which aims to...

We quantify the ‘permanent’ socio-economic impacts of the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995 by employing a large-scale panel data set of 1,719 wards from Japan over three decades. In order to overcome a fundamental difficulty of identifying the counterfactual, i.e., the Kobe...

We tabulate and measure the burden of disasters on the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) by aggregating and comparing the data found in the two global datasets on disaster impacts. We show that the most commonly used dataset greatly underestimates the burden of disasters for the Pacific islands....

We describe the flows of aid after large catastrophic natural disasters by using the extensive record of bilateral aid flows, by aid sector, available through the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. For each large donor, we identify the extent of cross-sector re-allocation that is...

This paper investigates the consequences of natural disasters on firms in Vietnam over the period 2000 to 2008. We examine the impacts of natural disasters on firm investment and retail sales. We find evidence of adverse effects of disasters on retail sales accompanied by an increase in firm...

The last few years have seen an explosion of economic research on the consequences of natural disasters. This new interest is attributable first and foremost to a growing awareness of the potentially catastrophic nature of these events, but also a result of the increasing awareness that natural...

We examine the effects of natural disasters on income and investment in China. Using detailed macroeconomic province-level data and their history of disaster exposure over the past two decades, and after accounting for two-way causality using a three-stage least-squares estimation procedure, we...

We conduct a meta-regression analysis of the existing literature on the impacts of disasters on households, focusing on the poor and on poverty measures. We find much heterogeneity in these impacts, but several general patterns, often observed in individual case-studies, emerge. Incomes are...