Public support effect on natural disaster management: A case study of ice storms in forests in Slovenia

Abstract

In the last decade Slovenia has experienced more frequent natural disasters in forests. The most severe and widespread one that affected Slovenian forests, which cover more than a half of Slovenian territory, was a large-scale ice storm in early February 2014. This study aims to investigate the effect of the public support on the recovery of forest farms affected by the 2014 ice storm. Analyses focus particularly on the ability of Slovenian forest farms’ income recovery in a short-time period. The economic resilience of forest farms in the absence of forest disaster payments due to the absence of legal certainty for disaster aid in 2014 and 2015 provides an interesting framework for identifying the income effect of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments. The Farm Accountancy Data Network has been used with applied statistical and regression methods to estimate the public support effect on selected woodland area size samples. Results suggest a positive effect of CAP payments on farm income recovery. The magnitude of the effect is high and significant for the less favoured area and disaster payments that were given for farm production loss in the 2013 drought. Although the magnitude of the effect is weak, investment payments show a significant positive effect on farm income recovery for all studied forest farm samples.