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The Wenchuan earthquake, which happened in May 2008 in China, was one of the most destructive natural disasters of the past decade. The Chinese government implemented several aid programs, including the Paired Assistance to Disaster-Affected Areas (PADAA) program, to assist with disaster recovery. Although the Wenchuan earthquake has gained much scholarly attention, previous studies often adopted different recovery measures and provided fragmented empirical evidence on how an aid program may have influenced the recovery process in both the short and long term. To bridge the gap, this paper collects eight social, economic, and institutional indicators to measure four types of recovery processes, namely, economic recovery, social recovery, institutional recovery, and built environment recovery. The data, collected between 2002 and 2015, covers 269 earthquake-stricken counties. Based on this data, we constructed a set of disaster recovery indexes. We then evaluated the impacts of the PADAA program on the disaster recovery process across the 269 counties in both the short and long term. We concluded that the impact of the PADAA program on the post-disaster economic recovery was significant in both the short and long term, whereas its impact on the recovery of the institutional and built environment occurred in the short term. Its impact on post-disaster social recovery was inconclusive.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions to governments and societies across the world. While public healthcare systems have come under immense pressure, public trust in governments and institutions are also in decline. In this paper, we seek to assess the resilience of policy systems and processes in 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic through the use of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). We focus specifically on robustness, preparedness, social capital, and institutional strength as key attributes of community resilience at city-level. Our analysis of the data reveals that COVID-19 resilience is dependent on a combination of factors, with a multi-factorial approach to policy design and governance necessary for effective pandemic and disaster recovery.