Throughout history, societies have had to decide whom to 'sacrifice' and whom to help in times of disaster. This volume examines how elite groups attempt to maintain power through the use of particular economic, political, and ideological instruments and how both ruling elites and common people endeavor to create meaningful traditions while enduring hardship.The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters demonstrates how vulnerability is economically constructed, primary producers adapt their production regimes, how traders and merchants adapt their practices, and how political economic objectives play out in recovery efforts.

Economic damage from natural hazards can sometimes be prevented and always mitigated. However, private individuals tend to underinvest in such measures due to problems of collective action, information asymmetry and myopic behavior. Governments, which can in principle correct these market failures, themselves face incentives to underinvest in costly disaster prevention policies and damage mitigation regulations. Yet, disaster damage varies greatly across countries. We argue that rational actors will invest more in trying to prevent and mitigate damage the larger a country's propensity to experience frequent and strong natural hazards. Accordingly, economic loss from an actually occurring disaster will be smaller the larger a country's disaster propensity - holding everything else equal, such as hazard magnitude, the country's total wealth and per capita income. At the same time, damage is not entirely preventable and smaller losses tend to be random. Disaster propensity will therefore have a larger marginal effect on larger predicted damages than on smaller ones. We employ quantile regression analysis in a global sample to test these predictions, focusing on the three disaster types causing the vast majority of damage worldwide: earthquakes, floods and tropical cyclones.

One of the primary responsibilities of governments is to shield citizens from life threatening events such as natural disasters. Previous work has demonstrated that voters electorally reward incumbents for the provision of disaster relief but not for investing in disaster prevention, leading incumbents to over-invest in relief spending even though investing in preparedness would yield large efficiency gains. This suggests that natural disasters offer governments a unique opportunity to improve their re-election prospects by providing generous disaster relief. Building on these findings, the present thesis first theorizes about and empirically explores which types of electorally motivated strategies guide the allocation of disaster relief. Using county-level data on natural disasters and relief payments in the context of U.S. presidential elections (1985-2008) the thesis shows that presidents channel relief aid to high-turnout counties in which they enjoy strong electoral support even when controlling for disaster damage. A subsequent analysis then investigates how citizens prefer policy benefits to be distributed among individuals experiencing natural disasters and to what extent presidents' distributive choices align with citizens' preferences. An exploration of data from a novel survey experiment with a representative sample of U.S. citizens suggests that citizens prefer allocations that reflect affectedness and need, but not electoral ties. Despite a notable degree of congruence between preferred and observed spending decisions, citizens' preferences do conflict with presidents' electoral considerations. Finally, the third part studies individual disaster policy preferences and investigates whether providing additional information about the effectiveness and efficiency of preventive measures affects support for preparedness spending. Two novel survey experiments with a representative sample of U.S. citizens indicate that i.

Since the turn of the millennium, more than one million people have been killed and 2.3 billion others have been directly affected by natural disasters around the world. In cases like the 2010 Haiti earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, these disasters have time and time again wrecked large populations and national infrastructures. While recognizing that improved rescue, evacuation, and disease control are crucial to reducing the effects of natural disasters, in the final analysis, poverty remains the main risk factor determining the long-term impact of natural hazards. Furthermore, natural disasters have themselves a tremendous impact on the poorest of the poor, who are often ill-prepared to deal with natural hazards and for whom a hurricane, an earthquake, or a drought can mean a permanent submersion in poverty. The Economic Impacts of Natural Disasters focuses on these concerns for poverty and vulnerability. Written by a collection of esteemed scholars in disaster management and sustainable development, the report provides an overview of the general trends in natural disasters and their effects by focusing on a critical analysis of different methodologies used to assess the economic impact of natural disasters. Economic Impacts presents six national case studies (Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Nicaragua, Japan and the Netherlands) and shows how household surveys and country-level macroeconomic data can analyze and quantify the economic impact of disasters. The researchers within Economic Impacts have created path-breaking work and have opened new avenues for thinking and debate to push forward the frontiers of knowledge on economics of natural disasters.

In August 2005 the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummelled the Gulf Coast. Residents did not just suffer the personal costs of a home that had been severely damaged or destroyed; frequently they also lost their entire neighbourhood and the social systems that under normal circumstances made their lives "work". Katrina raised the questions of whether and how communities could solve the complex social coordination problems catastrophic disaster poses, and what inhibits them from doing so? Professor Chamlee-Wright investigates not only the nature of post-disaster recovery, but the nature of the social order itself – how societies are able to achieve a level of complex social coordination that far exceeds our ability to design. By deploying the tools of both political economy and cultural economy, the book contributes to the bourgeoning literature on the social, political and economic impact of Hurricane Katrina. Through a selection of case studies, the author argues that post-disaster resilience depends crucially upon the discovery that unfolds within commercial and civil society. The book will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and researchers in economics, sociology and anthropology as well as disaster specialists.

This book sets out to develop a new framework for the analysis and understanding of large natural disasters occurring in developing countries in the last three decades, and their effects on the economy and society. In doing so, it challenges many of the accepted wisdoms of disaster theory upon which policy prescriptions are built. A number of important issues are addressed and analysed within this framework. The reliability of current statistics about disasters is questioned, and the effects of disaster situations on the main economic aggregates are examined. The author also looks at the importance of indirect disaster effects, the motivations of disaster response, and the impact of both capital loss and disaster response on output. He assesses the minimum level of additional investment required to secure a balanced recovery, and the extent to which a society's structure and dynamics determine people's vulnerability to disasters. Finally, the overall effects of disaster situations on economy and society are considered. The author concludes that although disasters are primarily a problem of development, they are not necessarily a problem for development. What we should be looking at are the underlying social and economic processes within developing countries which structure the impact of natural disasters, rather than at disasters as unforeseen events requiring large scale intervention. An important feature of the book is the deconstruction of the notion of disaster. Disasters, the author points out, cannot be analysed in isolation from the particular social and political setting in which they occur.

Only recently have economists understood natural and unnatural disasters as economic phenomena to be formally analyzed. Given the magnitude of many recent disasters, their impact on local, regional, and national economies, and the coverage of their consequences in the popular press, it is puzzling that the attention of economists was for so long largely diverted from analysis of these events. This book presents a noted group of contributors who stand at the forefront of this increasingly important subdiscipline of economics the economics of disasters. The chapters they contribute cover a wide variety of events and delve into the human and economic impacts disasters impose on nations around the world. Several themes dominant in this literature are discussed. These include the ability of potential disaster victims to accurately assess the risks they face, the role of incentives in ensuring that mitigation efforts are undertaken, the adequacy of our evaluation of the impact of disasters on economies, and discussion of the effectiveness of current government policies toward disaster prevention and relief. These will in all likelihood continue to be topics of discussion in the future as well.