Abstract
Background: Natural disasters have severe impacts on the health and well-being of affected households. However, we find evidence that official damage cost assessments for floods and other natural disasters in Vietnam, where households have little or no insurance, clearly underestimate the total economic damage costs of these events as they do not include the welfare loss from mortality, morbidity and reduced well-being experienced by the households affected by the floods. This should send a message to the local communities and national authorities that higher investments in flood alleviation, reduction and adaptive measures can be justified since the social benefits of these measures in terms of avoided damage costs are higher than previously thought.Methods: We pioneer the use of the contingent valuation (CV) approach of willingness-to-contribute (WTC) labour to a flood prevention program, as a measure of the welfare loss experienced by household due to a flooding event. In a face-to-face household survey of 706 households in the Quang Nam province in Central Vietnam, we applied this approach together with reported direct physical damage in order to shed light of the welfare loss experienced by the households. We asked about households’ WTC labour and multiplied their WTC person-days of labour by an estimate for their opportunity cost of time in order to estimate the welfare loss to households from the 2007 floods.Results: The results showed that this contingent valuation (CV) approach of asking about willingness-to-pay in-kind avoided the main problems associated with applying CV in developing countries.Conclusion: Thus, the CV approach of WTC labour instead of money is promising in terms of capturing the total welfare loss of natural disasters to households, and promising in terms of further application in other developing countries and for other types of natural disasters.
Highlights
Natural disasters have severe impacts on the health and well-being of affected households
For the reported physical damage, we looked at the difference in economic damage between (i) households that were very poor versus those that were not; (ii) households that fully depended on natural resources versus those that did not; (iii) households in a flooded versus a less-flooded area; and (iv) whether respondents reported having acted upon early warning messages or not
The small percentage that answered ‘No’ to contributing (i.e. 10; or 12.5% if we interpret the ‘don’t knows’ and missing responses as ‘No’) clearly shows that payment in-kind avoids the cash constraints observed in similar contingent valuation (CV) studies in developing countries that have asked for WTP in monetary terms (e.g. Brouwer et al [6], for flooding in Bangladesh)
Summary
Natural disasters have severe impacts on the health and well-being of affected households. We find evidence that official damage cost assessments for floods and other natural disasters in Vietnam, where households have little or no insurance, clearly underestimate the total economic damage costs of these events as they do not include the welfare loss from mortality, morbidity and well-being experienced by the households affected by the floods. This should send a message to the local communities and national authorities that higher investments in flood alleviation, reduction and adaptive measures can be justified since the social benefits of these measures in terms of avoided damage costs are higher than previously thought. Conclusion: the CV approach of WTC labour instead of money is promising in terms of capturing the total welfare loss of natural disasters, and promising in terms of further application in other developing countries and for other types of natural disasters
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
