Natural Disasters and Weak Government Institutions: Creating a Vicious Cycle that Ensnares Developing Countries

In the vast literature on natural disasters one aspect is largely unexplored, and this is the two-way relationship between natural disasters and the performance of public (government) institutions responsible for mitigating these natural disasters. The first relationship is that poor performance of public institutions responsible for mitigating natural disasters worsens the impact of natural disasters. The disaster literature is silent on the second relationship that, I argue, exists between natural disasters and public institutions: natural disasters can overwhelm the public institutions responsible for mitigating natural disasters and, as a result, it may make them even more ineffective. This paper is my attempt to fill this gap. I argue that this two-way relationship creates a particularly serious problem for developing countries, having the potential to trap developing countries in a vicious cycle: poor performance of public institutions triggering natural disasters, and natural disasters making public institutions more ineffective by overwhelming them. The exploration of this two-way relationship is necessary to have a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which natural disasters can detrimentally impact developing countries. The paper concludes that to break this vicious cycle, as a first step developing countries need to focus on institutional reform. Reform proposals should aim at improving the performance of the public institutions that are directly responsible for mitigating natural disasters. To address this challenge, scholars and governments must specifically identify the public institutions that are responsible for particular activities under review. Only then can the following questions be explored: what are the weaknesses of such public institutions, and how can their performance be improved?