IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/gdec09/35.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Macroeconomic Impact Of Natural Disasters In Developing Countries: Evidence From Hurricane Strikes In The Central American And Caribbean Region

Author

Listed:
  • Strobl, Eric

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the macroeconomic impact of natural disasters in developing countries by examining hurricane strikes in the Central American and Caribbean region. Our innovation in this regard is to employ a windfield model combined with a power dissipation equation on hurricane track data to arrive at a more scientifically based index of potential local destruction. This index allows us to identify potential damages at a detailed geographical level, compare hurricanes' destructiveness, as well as identify the countries most affected, without having to rely on potentially questionable monetary loss estimates. Combining our destruction index with macroeconomic data we show that the average hurricane strike caused output to fall by up to 0.8 percentage points in the region, although this crucially depends on controlling for local economic characteristics of the country affected.

Suggested Citation

  • Strobl, Eric, 2009. "The Macroeconomic Impact Of Natural Disasters In Developing Countries: Evidence From Hurricane Strikes In The Central American And Caribbean Region," Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Frankfurt a.M. 2009 35, Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:gdec09:35
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/39955/1/35_strobl.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Macro-Economic Effects of Hurricanes (Ref.: Central America)
      by UDADISI in UDADISI on 2012-09-06 23:47:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Karen Fisher-Vanden & Ian Sue Wing & Elisa Lanzi & David Popp, 2013. "Modeling climate change feedbacks and adaptation responses: recent approaches and shortcomings," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 117(3), pages 481-495, April.
    2. Nekeisha Spencer & Eric Strobl, 2022. "Poverty and hurricane risk exposure in Jamaica," The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association), vol. 47(1), pages 141-157, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    economic growth; hurricanes;

    JEL classification:

    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:gdec09:35. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfselea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.