The Dynamics of Recovery: A Framework

Each disaster reminds us that, from an economic standpoint, losses do not occur instantaneously, but are accumulated over the course of a sometimes long and complex recovery process. Moreover, disasters are spatial events that impact some places and some groups within those places more heavily than others. These effects can be observed in both natural disasters and human-induced events. Thus in the September 11th tragedy of 2001, the loss of the World Trade Center towers and the thousands of human lives do not in themselves constitute the economic impact of the disaster. Neither does the loss of gross regional product (GRP) on the 11th itself. Rather, the economic impact of the disaster is strongly influenced by the multitude of decisions made in the days and months following — decisions regarding whether to relocate an office to New Jersey and for how long, whether to lay off workers and how many, and whether to inject stimulus spending into the New York City economy and how much. Similar post-event decisions strongly influence recovery in natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. In other words, the process of disaster recovery is critical to understanding the spatial economic impacts of disasters, yet the recovery process itself is extremely complex and uncertain.