Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters

By D. Kellenberg, A. M. Mobarak. 2008

441 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent empirical literature has found a negative relationship between income per capita and measures of risk from natural disaster, supportive of logic that higher incomes allow countries to mitigate disaster risk. We argue that behavioral changes at the micro level in response to increasing income (such as location choice and extent of costly abatement activity) may lead to a non-linear relationship between aggregate incomes and disaster damages, where the risks increase with income before they decrease. In a country-year panel data set, we show that disaster risk associated with flooding, landslides and windstorms increases with income up to GDP per capita levels of $5044, $3360, and $4688 per year respectively and decrease thereafter. Such non-linear impacts are absent for other disaster types such as extreme temperature events and earthquakes where the links between human behavioral choices and exposure to risk are not as strong. From a policy perspective, this suggests that for the least developed countries, the dual goals of disaster risk prevention and economic development cannot be assumed to be complementary for all forms of natural disaster. In addition to allocating resources to manage disaster risk, the poorest nations may have to be more proactive in enacting policies that alter the behavioral choices of citizens that impact a country's exposure to natural disaster risk.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/caabbf1103819a3d6db461075e62a7ce48265c64

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Sociology and Political Science

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Economic development and losses due to natural disasters: The role of hazard exposure (2011, background): “The two main gard are the articles by Lewis and Nickerson (1989), which deals self-insurance under uncertainty, as well as Anbarci et al.”
Natural Disasters, Human Development and Poverty at the Municipal Level in Mexico (2012, background): “Kellenberg and Mobarak (2008) find significant effects from diverse natural disasters on human lives, especially from floodings, landslides and windstorms, using a panel of countries, as such events, they argue, are more related to behavioural choices.”
Natural disasters' impact, factors of resilience and development: A meta-analysis of the macroeconomic literature (2014, background): “53 0 1 Kellenberg and Mobarak (2008) Killed Count 3271 30 -16.78 6.13 -30.46 -6.68 -17.36 1 1 Killed 3271 60 -2.01 5.13 -14.84 8.49 -1.10 0 1 Raschky (2008) Killed, damage Affected 2792 6 -14.”
Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change (2011, background): “For instance, Kellenberg and Mobarak (2008) show that socioeconomic development initially increases the occurrence and level of loss of life resulting from landslides, f loods, and windstorms, whereas for earthquakes and extreme temperature it is reduced immediately.”
Understanding the adaptation deficit: why are poor countries more vulnerable to climate events than rich countries? (2013, background): “Most of the existing literature con entrates on the human costs of disaster events (e.g. Kellenberg and Mobarak 2008, Anbarci et al. 2005, Kahn 2005).”
The Economic Impacts of Natural Disasters: A Review of Models and Empirical Studies (2019, background): “Others have followed up and expanded on these findings, including Kellenberg and Mobarak (2008), who show that the fatality–income relationship is nonlinear, increasing at lower levels of per capita income and then decreasing.”
Economic Vulnerability and Resilience to Natural Hazards: A Survey of Concepts and Measurements (2018, background): “However, there is difference in the findings as to the direction of relationship between the level of economic development and disaster (as in Kellenberg and Mobarak [64]), as well as the extent to which the level of development influences vulnerability between developed and developing countries, an”
Informing Climate Adaptation: A Review of the Economic Costs of Natural Disasters, Their Determinants, and Risk Reduction Options (2012, neutral): “Kellenberg and Mobarak (2008), on the other hand, use country fixed effects and argue that this is an important improvement.”
Disasters and Development: Natural Disasters, Credit Constraints and Economic Growth (2014, positive): “The effects of disaster events, in terms of the numbers of people killed or affected, are dependent to some extent on various socio-economic factors (see for example Sen, 1981; Kellenberg and Mobarak, 2008).”