IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3703.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Government Repression and the Death Toll from Natural Disasters

Author

Listed:
  • Samia Costa

Abstract

Natural disasters have been a major cause of human suffering. Countries with higher income, lower inequality, lower corruption, and more democratic regimes have been found to experience less casualties from disasters. Government repression, however, could also play a role in disaster preparedness. In particular, I examine whether governments that are deemed to be human rights violators, which may not expect to receive assistance, experience lower casualties due perhaps to greater investment in disaster preparedness. I find an inverse U-shaped relationship between repression and casualties, with countries at either end of the distribution experiencing lower fatalities.

Suggested Citation

  • Samia Costa, 2012. "Government Repression and the Death Toll from Natural Disasters," CESifo Working Paper Series 3703, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3703
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3703.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy Besley & Torsten Persson, 2009. "Repression or Civil War?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 292-297, May.
    2. Monica Escaleras & Nejat Anbarci & Charles Register, 2007. "Public sector corruption and major earthquakes: A potentially deadly interaction," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 132(1), pages 209-230, July.
    3. Matthew E. Kahn, 2005. "The Death Toll from Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography, and Institutions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(2), pages 271-284, May.
    4. Toya, Hideki & Skidmore, Mark, 2007. "Economic development and the impacts of natural disasters," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 94(1), pages 20-25, January.
    5. Anbarci, Nejat & Escaleras, Monica & Register, Charles A., 2005. "Earthquake fatalities: the interaction of nature and political economy," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(9-10), pages 1907-1933, September.
    6. Kellenberg, Derek K. & Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq, 2008. "Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters?," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(3), pages 788-802, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eiji Yamamura, 2013. "Public sector corruption and the probability of technological disasters," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 233-255, August.
    2. Yamamura, Eiji, 2011. "The changing effect of legal origin on death tolls in natural disasters from 1960 to 2008," MPRA Paper 33112, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Eiji Yamamura, 2014. "Impact of natural disaster on public sector corruption," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 161(3), pages 385-405, December.
    4. Yashobanta Parida & Prarthna Agarwal Goel & Joyita Roy Chowdhury & Prakash Kumar Sahoo & Tapaswini Nayak, 2021. "Do economic development and disaster adaptation measures reduce the impact of natural disasters? A district-level analysis, Odisha, India," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 23(3), pages 3487-3519, March.
    5. Eiji Yamamura, 2013. "Institution and decomposition of natural disaster impact on growth," Journal of Economic Studies, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 40(6), pages 720-738, October.
    6. Lazzaroni, Sara & van Bergeijk, Peter A.G., 2014. "Natural disasters' impact, factors of resilience and development: A meta-analysis of the macroeconomic literature," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 333-346.
    7. Peter A. G. van Bergeijk & Sara Lazzaroni, 2015. "Macroeconomics of Natural Disasters: Strengths and Weaknesses of Meta‐Analysis Versus Review of Literature," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 35(6), pages 1050-1072, June.
    8. Hiroki Onuma & Kong Joo Shin & Shunsuke Managi, 2017. "Reduction of future disaster damages by learning from disaster experiences," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 87(3), pages 1435-1452, July.
    9. Jaap W.B. Bos & Jasmin Gröschl & Martien Lamers & Runliang Li & Mark Sanders & Vincent Schippers & Jasmin Katrin Gröschl, 2022. "How Do Institutions Affect the Impact of Natural Disasters?," CESifo Working Paper Series 10174, CESifo.
    10. Eiji Yamamura, 2012. "Death tolls from natural disasters: Influence of interactions among fiscal decentralization, institutions and economic development," EERI Research Paper Series EERI_RP_2012_08, Economics and Econometrics Research Institute (EERI), Brussels.
    11. Chandra Bahinipati & Unmesh Patnaik, 2015. "The damages from climatic extremes in India: do disaster-specific and generic adaptation measures matter?," Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Springer;Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS, vol. 17(1), pages 157-177, January.
    12. Yamamura, Eiji, 2012. "Death tolls from natural disasters: Influence of interactions between fiscal decentralization, institution, and economic development," MPRA Paper 36987, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Yamamura, Eiji, 2011. "Effect of free media on views regarding the safety of nuclear energy after the 2011 disasters in Japan: evidence using cross-country data," MPRA Paper 32011, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Emmanuel Apergis & Nicholas Apergis, 2021. "The impact of COVID-19 on economic growth: evidence from a Bayesian Panel Vector Autoregressive (BPVAR) model," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(58), pages 6739-6751, December.
    15. Narasingha Das & Partha Gangopadhyay, 2023. "Did weekly economic index and volatility index impact US food sales during the first year of the pandemic?," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 9(1), pages 1-23, December.
    16. Matthew A. COLE & Robert J R ELLIOTT & OKUBO Toshihiro & Eric STROBL, 2013. "Natural Disasters and Plant Survival: The impact of the Kobe earthquake," Discussion papers 13063, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    17. Eduardo Cavallo & Ilan Noy, 2009. "The Economics of Natural Disasters: A Survey," Research Department Publications 4649, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    18. Padli, Jaharudin & Habibullah, Muzafar & Abdul Hamid, Baharom & Musa, Haslina, 2019. "Mitigating Fatalities and Damages Due to Natural Disasters: Do Human Development and Corruption Matters?," Jurnal Ekonomi Malaysia, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, vol. 53(2), pages 153-164.
    19. Richard S. J. Tol, 2022. "State capacity and vulnerability to natural disasters," Chapters, in: Mark Skidmore (ed.), Handbook on the Economics of Disasters, chapter 20, pages 434-457, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    20. Mark Skidmore & Hideki Toya, 2013. "Natural Disaster Impacts and Fiscal Decentralization," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 89(1), pages 101-117.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    natural disasters; government repression; disaster preparedness; human rights;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • O00 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - General - - - General
    • F35 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Aid

    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:ces:ceswps:_3703. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.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.