Earthquake Fatalities: The Interaction of Nature and Political Economy

By Nejat Anbarcı, Monica P. Escaleras, C. Register. 2005

409 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To say that the level of fatalities resulting from an earthquake is inversely related to a country's per capita level of income is hardly novel. What makes our approach novel is that we relate fatalities to both per capita income and the level of inequality that exists within a country through their joint impact on the likelihood of collective action being taken to mitigate the destructive potential of quakes. We first develop a theoretical model which offers an explanation as to why, in some environments, different segments of society prove incapable of arriving at what all parties perceive to be an agreeable distribution of the burden of the necessary collective action, causing the relatively wealthy simply to self-insure against the disaster while leaving the relatively poor to its mercy. Following this, we test our theoretical model by evaluating 269 large earthquakes occurring worldwide, between 1960 and 2002, taking into account other factors that influence a quake's destructiveness such as its magnitude, depth and proximity to population centers. Using a Negative Binomial estimation strategy with both random and fixed estimators, we find strong evidence of the theoretical model's predictions. That is, while earthquakes themselves are natural phenomena beyond the reach of humankind, our collective inaction with respect to items like the creation and enforcement of building codes, failure to retrofit structures and to enact quake-sensitive zoning clearly plays a part in determining the actual toll that a given quake takes. And, it is through these and other examples of collective inaction that limited per capita income and inequality couple together with a given quake's natural destructive power in determining the actual fatalities resulting from a quake.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/319eff9587db80f7e2b7643e38aba0b3a6d78355

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Citations in the corpus

The economics of natural disasters in a developing country: The case of Vietnam (2010, background): “Several papers investigate the institutional and structural determinants of initial disaster costs (Anbarci et al., 2005; Kahn, 2004; Raschky, 2008; and Skidmore and Toya, 2007) or of the”
Understanding the adaptation deficit: why are poor countries more vulnerable to climate events than rich countries? (2013, background): “Earthquakes are of less interest here, given our focus on climate-related adaptation, and they already feature prominently in the literature (e.g. Anbarci et al. 2005, and Keefer et al. 2011).”
Earthquake propensity and the politics of mortality prevention (2010, positive): “And in contrast to Anbarci et al. (2005) and Escaleras et al. (2007), who also show an inverse relationship between earthquake propensity and mortality, we use more accurate measures of the magnitude and location of earthquakes and of quake propensity that take into account the exponential nature of”
Climatic natural disasters, political risk, and international trade (2010, background): “Increases in the population and housing units in vulnerable areas (Pielke et al., 2008), the number of affected people (Raschky, 2008), population size (Kahn, 2005), and economic inequality were found to increase the impact (Kahn, 2005, Anbarci et al., 2005).”
Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters (2008, methodology): “D.K. Kellenberg, A.M. Mobarak / Journal of Urban Economics 63 (2008) 788–802 795 As an alternative, we also estimate using a negative binomial specification like that estimated in Anbarci et al. (2005).”
Public sector corruption and major earthquakes: A potentially deadly interaction (2007, methodology): “24 These results, other than for the corruption variable, which to date has not been evaluated, are quite similar to those reported in Anbarci, Escaleras, and Register (2005) and Kahn (2005).”
The economic growth impact of natural disasters in developing countries: Evidence from hurricane strikes in the Central American and Caribbean regions (2012, background): “see, for instance, Anbarci et al (2005) , Kahn (2005), Toya and Skidmore (2007),”
Economic Vulnerability and Resilience to Natural Hazards: A Survey of Concepts and Measurements (2018, methodology): “Anbarci, Escaleras and Register [63] used negative binomial models to examine the influence of inequality on disaster risk, using a political economy model.”