Earthquake propensity and the politics of mortality prevention

By Philip E. Keefer, Eric Neumayer, Thomas Pluemper. 2010

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by implementing and enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. The authors examine why many governments do not. Contrary to intuition, controlling for the strength and location of actual earthquakes, mortality is lower in countries with higher earthquake propensity, where the payoffs to mortality prevention are higher. Importantly, however, the government response to earthquake propensity depends on country income and the political incentives of governments to provide public goods to citizens. The opportunity costs of earthquake mortality prevention are higher in poorer countries; rich countries invest more in mortality prevention than poor countries in response to a higher earthquake propensity. Similarly, governments that have fewer incentives to provide public goods, such as younger democracies, autocracies with less institutionalized ruling parties and countries with corrupt regimes, respond less to an elevated quake propensity. They therefore have higher mortality at any level of quake propensity compared to older democracies, autocracies with highly institutionalized parties and non-corrupt regimes, respectively. The authors find robust evidence for these predictions in our analysis of earthquake mortality over the period 1960 to 2005.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48706f4269b094e93b7484e81cde1fbd39fec7cf

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Citations in the corpus

Risk and Adaptation: Evidence from Global Hurricane Damages and Fatalities (2016, background): “Past studies have also examined whether countries that experience frequent hazards have lower residual impacts (Keefer, Neumayer, and Plümper 2011; Schumacher and Strobl 2011; Hsiang and Narita 2012; Fankhauser and McDermott 2014; Neumayer, Plümper, and Barthel 2014).”
The political economy of natural disaster damage (2014, background): “However, even autocracies cannot entirely ignore citizen support and in Keefer et al. (2011) we explore the conditioning effect of political regime type and other governance aspects on earthquake mortality.”