The Indirect Cost of Natural Disasters and an Economic Definition of Macroeconomic Resilience

Hallegatte, Stephane

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ECONOMIC SITUATION;    RISKS;    GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS;    ECONOMIC GROWTH;    STORM;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7357
RP-ID  :  WPS7357

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The welfare impact of a disaster doesnot depend only on the physical characteristics of the eventor its direct impacts in terms of lost lives and assets.Depending on the ability of the economy to cope, recover,and reconstruct, the reconstruction will be more or lessdifficult, and the welfare effects smaller or larger. Thisability, which can be referred to as the macroeconomicresilience of the economy to natural disasters, is animportant parameter to estimate the overall vulnerability ofa population. Here, resilience is decomposed into twocomponents: instantaneous resilience, which is the abilityto limit the magnitude of the immediate loss of income for agiven amount of capital losses, and dynamic resilience,which is the ability to reconstruct and recover quickly. Thepaper proposes a rule of thumb to estimate macroeconomicresilience, based on the interest rate (a higher interestrate decreases resilience and increases welfare losses), thereconstruction duration (a longer reconstruction durationincreases welfare losses), and a “ripple-effect” factor thatincreases or decreases immediate losses (negative if enoughidle resources are available to cope; positive ifcross-sector and supply-chain issues impair the productionof non-affected capital). An optimal risk managementstrategy is very likely to include measures to reduce directimpacts (disaster risk reduction actions) and measures toreduce indirect impacts (resilience building actions).