Comparative Public Finance Approaches to Natural Hazards Management

Abstract

An important challenge of natural hazards is that they inflict the greatest total economic damage in large, developed countries, where wealth is aggregated, but they create the greatest economic impact in smaller and developing countries, where a disaster caused by a natural hazard can easily overwhelm a national government’s ability to respond and its economy to recover. Thus, a common understanding in the literature is that the fiscal effect of a natural hazard is a function of the size of the disaster relative to the size of a nation’s economy at the time of the disaster. At the international level, the economic impact of disasters, for example, has been estimated to be US$2.9 trillion between 1998 and 2017, and approximately $945 billion of that occurred in the United States. With a 2019 gross domestic product (GDP) of $21 trillion, the total economic effect for those 20 years is close to 5% of the value of economic output for a single year. Developing country losses, on the other hand, can be overwhelming, especially as measured against the size of the economy. For example, Hurricane Maria’s impact on Dominica is estimated to have been approximately US$1.37 billion, which was equivalent to 225% of Dominica’s GDP. While an appreciation for the connection between the size of a national economy and natural hazards is clearly critical, the literature points to a number of additional factors that are important to understand about how government financial conditions are affected by natural hazards and vice versa. Debates continue about the role of foreign direct investment, government and private debt levels, investments in education, and internationally sponsored protective actions and insurance pools in improving the resilience of smaller and developing countries to disasters. For example, structural approaches to understanding the linkage between disasters and economic development suggest that countries with a limited number of sources of income have economies that are more vulnerable to disasters than more diversified economies, which might suggest that fiscal policies designed to increase economic diversity are important. Neoclassical approaches, on the other hand, argue that economic recovery is slowed by government intervention in the economy, and suggest that the best way for developing economies to recovery quickly is to reduce the amount of regulation in the economy. Whatever the theoretical approach, what remains most clear is the ongoing challenge of decoupling the emotional need to participate in responses to the human tragedy associated with disasters caused by natural hazards from the strategic imperative to invest in hazard mitigation at much higher rates globally and plan toward disaster risk reduction.