Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Wenchuan earthquake claimed more than 80,000 casualties and left about 4.8 million people homeless [1]
Restoration to pre-disaster conditions or a new normality is often used as a benchmark for recovery, whereas the post-disaster recovery process is studied from the perspectives of economic recovery [8], social recovery [9], institutional recovery [10], and built environment recovery [11]
We identified four comparable geographical area groups in the Wenchuan earthquake region: (1) non-damaged counties (Non_Damaged); (2) damaged counties which did not receive any government reconstruction plan (Non_Planned); (3) damaged counties which received some form of the government reconstruction plan but were not assisted by the Paired Assistance to Disaster-Affected Areas (PADAA) program (Planned); and (4) damaged counties which were assisted by some form of the government reconstruction plan and were assisted by the PADAA program (Planned_PADAA)
Summary
The Wenchuan earthquake claimed more than 80,000 casualties and left about 4.8 million people homeless [1]. Disaster recovery is defined as the process of “restoring, rebuilding, and reshaping the physical, social, economic, and natural environment through pre-event planning and post-event actions” Restoration to pre-disaster conditions or a new normality is often used as a benchmark for recovery, whereas the post-disaster recovery process is studied from the perspectives of economic recovery [8], social recovery [9], institutional recovery [10], and built environment recovery [11]. To address this research gap, we adopted a holistic approach to determine how the PADAA program aided the recovery from the Wenchuan earthquake. It is noted that the earthquake damage in the fourth group was the gravest (Table A1 of Appendix A) This identification allowed us to conduct a comparative analysis to analyze the impacts of the PADAA program on the post-Wenchuan earthquake recovery.
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