Assessing the Macroeconomic Impacts of Natural Disasters: Are There Any?
By S. Hochrainer. 2009
241 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There is an ongoing debate on whether disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and are truly a potential impediment to economic development. This paper aims to assess whether and by what mechanisms disasters have the potential to cause significant GDP impacts. The analysis first studies the counterfactual versus the observed gross domestic product. Second, the analysis assesses disaster impacts as a function of hazard, exposure of assets, and, importantly, vulnerability. In a medium-term analysis (up to 5 years after the disaster event), comparing counterfactual with observed gross domestic product, the authors find that natural disasters on average can lead to negative consequences. Although the negative effects may be small, they can become more pronounced depending mainly on the size of the shock. Furthermore, the authors test a large number of vulnerability predictors and find that greater aid and inflows of remittances reduce adverse macroeconomic consequences, and that direct losses appear most critical.
Subfields: Development, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76392196bc66e35bdefb12dd4323c0f85692a7c0
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In Development
In Sociology and Political Science
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Naturally Negative: The Growth Effects of Natural Disasters (2014, unknown): “33See Hochrainer (2009) Figure 1 for a graphical illustration of possible effects.”
- Feeling the Heat: Climate Risks and the Cost of Sovereign Borrowing (2021, background): “While a growing body of research has studied the macroeconomic impacts of climate change (Hochrainer 2009; von Peter, von Dahlen, and Saxena 2012; Cabezon et al. 2015; Batten 2018; Mercure et al. 2018; Cantelmo, Melina, and Papageorgiou 2019; Batten, Sowerbutts, and Tanaka 2020), relatively little r”
- Natural disasters and labor markets (2017, background): “For example, Hochrainer (2009) finds that natural disasters have significant negative e↵ects on GDP in the medium run; higher aid rates and higher remittances lessen the adverse e↵ects and higher capital stock losses worsen the negative e↵ects.”
- Climate change, adaptation and economic growth (2012, background): “They argued that this is why some reviews of the costs of natural disasters have not found them to be particularly high (see, for example, Hochrainer 2009).”
- Informing Climate Adaptation: A Review of the Economic Costs of Natural Disasters, Their Determinants, and Risk Reduction Options (2012, unknown): “Aid and remittances may lessen the impact (Hochrainer 2009).”