The lack of property rights can make natural disasters worse: The case of small-scale fisheries in Chile

Abstract

Developing countries tend to suffer the most from natural disasters, but the mechanisms underlying this outcome are poorly understood. In this paper, I study one of the potential mechanisms behind this pattern: the lack of strong and well-defined property rights for renewable resources. Using fisheries as an example, I examine how different property rights regimes dictating who has access to the resource could determine the overall exposure, as well as the cost of the rebuilding paths that fishers follow after a natural disaster. Using small-scale fisheries in Chile as a case study, I show that fisheries operating in common access are on average more exposed and also follow costlier recovery paths after the tsunami that hit the country in 2010. This paper contributes to the ongoing work on the economic impact of natural disasters and provides an argument for further study of how institutional regimes can be also understood as potential adaptation strategies.