Browsing by Author "duPont IV, William"
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Item Open Access The long-term consequences of natural disasters — A summary of the literature(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2016) Noy, Ilan; duPont IV, WilliamThe long-term economic impact of natural disasters is a subject that is highly debated among scholars. Several factors should be taken into consideration: These include the type and severity of natural disaster, the underlying wealth of the economy, and the total area of country impacted. Additionally, the way that researchers choose to define long-term impact, look at direct and indirect damage, and the availability of data also matters. Regardless of the method used there is still not a clear consensus concerning the long-term economic consequences of disasters. To discuss the long-term economic impact of natural disasters, one must first define impact. A common way to determine this impact is to compare the economy post disaster to the level it was at prior to the disaster. Some researchers argue that an economy has recovered when it returns to pre-disaster levels. This approach can be useful when comparing the impact in the short-term; however when analyzing the long-term impact it becomes problematic. Economies are constantly changing, and over long periods of time these changes will accumulate. Therefore one of the biggest challenges for researchers is to estimate what the level the economy would be at had the natural disaster not occurred. The way in which researchers go about doing this, can have a large impact on the results they find. Researchers have not reached consensus concerning the long-term consequences to natural disasters. Several authors have found very little to no impact, of natural disasters in the long-term, especially when using country level data. There have been some notable exceptions. Poor countries as well as small island nations have been found to be less resilient in the long-term. Studies using data collected at regional and local, have found a much more nuanced set of results regardless of wealth, income, or size.Item Open Access What happened to Kobe? A reassessment of the impact of the 1995 earthquake in Japan(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2012) duPont IV, William; Noy, IlanThe received wisdom is that the devastation wrought by the 1995 Kobe earthquake did not have any long‐term impact on the Japanese economy, nor much impact on Kobe itself. We re‐evaluate the evidence using a new methodology, synthetic control, and find a persistent and still continuing adverse impact of the quake on the economy of Kobe more than 15 years after the event. Using the methodology developed by Abadie et al. (2010), we construct counter‐factual dynamics for the Kobe economy. We identify a decline in per capita GDP that is attributable to the quake and is persistent, long‐term, and clearly observable even 15 years after the quake. GDP per capita in 2007 was 500,000 yen per person lower (13% decrease) than it would have been had the earthquake not occurred. Importantly, this adverse long‐term impact is identified in a wealthy region of a developed country, and with the backing of a deeppocketed fiscal authority.