What causes nations to recover from disasters? An inquiry into the role of wealth, income inequality, and social welfare provisioning

Abstract

Disasters affect significant numbers of people in the poorest parts of the world. The main impediment to progress in reducing the extent of disaster outcomes appears to come from inabilities to address macro-economic drivers of vulnerability. This study examines the association between three key drivers of vulnerability, i.e. wealth/poverty, income inequality and the absence/presence of social welfare systems, and short-term and long-term disaster outcomes.Drawing on lengthy time-series data, we apply a data driven approach, focusing only on those countries that have experienced major natural or technological disasters, to generate new understanding of these drivers. Our study finds that in relation to natural hazards: less developed countries experience worse human impacts than more developed countries; developed countries suffer larger economic losses; countries with greater levels of income inequality have more people affected than in more equal countries; and social welfare (using both Sen's indexes and public social spending) in OECD countries appears to reduce the human impacts of disasters. We also conclude that the human impacts of natural disasters delay economic growth in poor countries. For the technological hazard-associated disasters, while there is no evidence that national wealth and income inequality determine human impacts, we find that larger human impacts in poor countries undermines economic growth. Our key finding is the unequivocal and central role of income inequality in shaping disaster outcomes. Future research and policy on disaster risk reduction has to acknowledge this 'elephant in the room'.

Determinants of household vulnerability to food insecurity during COVID-19 lockdown in a mid-term period in Iran

“…To reduce the spread of the virus, the Iranian government executed several coping strategies, including quarantine, isolation and social distancing. Unlike the previous studies which assessed the vulnerability of households in different countries in a stable and non-viral environment (7)(8)(9)(10) , the present study assesses the vulnerability of households to food insecurity during the COVID-19 outbreak.…”

Did Decentralisation Affect Citizens’ Perception of the European Union? The Impact during the Height of Decentralisation in Europe

“…Decentralisation can also mobilise underused resources creating competition among subnational governments, thus delivering better policies (Rodríguez-Pose and Ezcurra 2010). Local governments are deemed to have information advantages over central governments regarding the needs and wants of locals (Ezcurra and Pascual 2008;Tselios et al 2012;Tselios and Tompkins 2019) and local officials considered better able to design and implement policies at the local level than officials in remote central governments (de Mello 2011;Lessmann 2009;Tselios et al 2012). Moreover, smaller constituencies are regarded as being more homogeneous and more easily controllable than larger ones, where voter power is diluted (Wyplosz 2015;Olson 1971).…”

The disaster trap: cyclones, tourism, colonial legacies, and the systemic feedbacks exacerbating disaster risk

“…The long, open-ended period of recovery from a disaster event is the phase of a disaster that the vast field of disaster studies struggles to understand (Olshansky et al, 2012). In the process of rebuilding, places do not simply reset -they transform, often in ways that confound any reduction of disaster risk, instead making people and settings more vulnerable to future hazard events (Mileti, 1999;Burby, 2006;Cutter and Emrich, 2006;Kates et al, 2006;Sovacool, 2017;Tselios and Tompkins, 2019;Finucane et al, 2020). Follow the trajectory of a coastal tourist destination after a tropical cyclone: despite formal guidance to the contrary, buildings get rebuilt not better (UNDRR, 2015) but bigger (Lazarus et al, 2018), protected by bulkier coastal defences (Sovacool, 2011;Gittman et al, 2015;Logan et al, 2018;Nunn et al, 2021); people who cannot afford to rebuild get displaced by others who can (Cutter and Emrich, 2006;Gladstone and Préau, 2008;Gould and Lewis, 2018); public assets and services are sold and contracted to for-profit multinational corporations (Klein, 2007;Gunewardena and Schuller, 2008;Gotham, 2012;Loewenstein, 2015); to attract visitors and investments, tourism consumes the local economy (Mair et al, 2016;Wright et al, 2020); the built environment expands at direct expense of the natural environment (Mileti, 1999;Lewsey et al, 2004;Nordstrom, 2004;Carr and Heyman, 2009).…”

“…Many coastal resorts are controlled by multinational corporations (Scott et al 2012), meaning tourist money spent locally does not stay local, and wages and benefits may be depressed for lack of competitive alternatives (Cutter and Emrich, 2006;Lightfoot, 2020). This can open a wealth gap (Cutter and Emrich, 2006;Tselios and Tompkins, 2019), or exacerbate inequities from a colonial legacy (Cruz-Martínez et al, 2018;Bledsoe and Wright, 2019;Davis et al, 2019;Look et al, 2019;Moulton and Machado, 2019;Popke and Rhiney, 2019;Bonilla, 2020;Gahman and Thongs, 2020;Lightfoot, 2020;Popke, 2020;Rivera, 2020;Faria et al, 2021). As the local economy depends increasingly on tourism, the gilded trap gains strength.…”