IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/esj/esridp/101.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Do People Cope With Natural Disasters? Evidence from the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake

Author

Listed:
  • SAWADA Yasuyuki
  • SHIMIZUTANI Satoshi

Abstract

We investigate how people coped with unexpected losses caused by the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake by using some unusually rich household data. Several empirical findings emerged. We found that the coping means were specific to the nature of the loss caused by the earthquake. For example, borrowing was extensively used to recover the damages to housing, whereas dissavings were utilized to compensate for the loss to assets. Our analysis in this paper contains important policy implications in the preparation of well-designed social safety nets against future natural disasters. Since the economic losses caused by natural disasters are often too large for the government to support effectively, its role is to facilitate the self-insurance of the victims of the disasters. Our empirical results suggest that provisions of the subsidized loan programs to the victims can be a good example.

Suggested Citation

  • SAWADA Yasuyuki & SHIMIZUTANI Satoshi, 2004. "How Do People Cope With Natural Disasters? Evidence from the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake," ESRI Discussion paper series 101, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
    • Handle: RePEc:esj:esridp:101
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esri.go.jp/jp/archive/e_dis/e_dis110/e_dis101a.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Caballero, Ricardo J., 1990. "Consumption puzzles and precautionary savings," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 113-136, January.
    2. Zeldes, Stephen P, 1989. "Consumption and Liquidity Constraints: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(2), pages 305-346, April.
    3. Sung Jin Kang & Yasuyuki Sawada, 2008. "Credit Crunch And Household Welfare, The Case Of The Korean Financial Crisis," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 59(4), pages 438-458, December.
    4. Horwich, George, 2000. "Economic Lessons of the Kobe Earthquake," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(3), pages 521-542, April.
    5. Frankenberg, E. & Thomas, D. & Beegle, K., 1999. "The Real Costs of Indonesia's Economic Crisis: Preliminary Findings from the Indonesia Family Life Surveys," Papers 99-04, RAND - Labor and Population Program.
    6. Kohara, Miki & Ohtake, Fumio & Saito, Makoto, 2002. "A Test of the Full Insurance Hypothesis: The Case of Japan," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 16(3), pages 335-352, September.
    7. Townsend, Robert M, 1994. "Risk and Insurance in Village India," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 62(3), pages 539-591, May.
    8. Christopher D. Carroll & Andrew A. Samwick, 1998. "How Important Is Precautionary Saving?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(3), pages 410-419, August.
    9. Martha L. Olney, 1999. "Avoiding Default: The Role of Credit in the Consumption Collapse of 1930," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(1), pages 319-335.
    10. Cox, Donald & Jimenez, Emmanuel, 1990. "Achieving Social Objectives through Private Transfers: A Review," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 5(2), pages 205-218, July.
    11. Besley, Timothy, 1995. "Savings, credit and insurance," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Hollis Chenery & T.N. Srinivasan (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 36, pages 2123-2207, Elsevier.
    12. Froot, Kenneth A., 2001. "The market for catastrophe risk: a clinical examination," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(2-3), pages 529-571, May.
    13. Eswaran, Mukesh & Kotwal, Ashok, 1989. "Credit as insurance in agrarian economies," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 37-53, July.
    14. Horioka, Charles Yuji & Watanabe, Wako, 1997. "Why Do People Save? A Micro-Analysis of Motives for Household Saving in Japan," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(442), pages 537-552, May.
    15. Robert M. Townsend, 1995. "Consumption Insurance: An Evaluation of Risk-Bearing Systems in Low-Income Economies," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 83-102, Summer.
    16. Hayne E. Leland, 1968. "Saving and Uncertainty: The Precautionary Demand for Saving," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 82(3), pages 465-473.
    17. Altonji, Joseph G & Hayashi, Fumio & Kotlikoff, Laurence J, 1997. "Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(6), pages 1121-1166, December.
    18. Skidmore, Mark, 2001. "Risk, natural disasters, and household savings in a life cycle model," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 15-34, January.
    19. Coate, Stephen & Ravallion, Martin, 1993. "Reciprocity without commitment : Characterization and performance of informal insurance arrangements," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 1-24, February.
    20. Fumio Hayashi, 1996. "Analysis Of Household Saving: Past, Present, And Furture," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 47(1), pages 21-33, March.
    21. Satoshi Shimizutani, 2003. "Income Variability and Consumption-A Full Consumption Insurance Test Using Japanese Micro Data in the 1990s (in Japanese)," Economic Analysis, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), vol. 169, pages 52-68, March.
    22. Tullio Jappelli, 1990. "Who is Credit Constrained in the U. S. Economy?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 105(1), pages 219-234.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Colin Green & Loraine McFadden, 2007. "Coastal Vulnerability as Discourse About Meanings and Values," Journal of Risk Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(8), pages 1027-1045, December.

    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. Yasuyuki Sawada & Satoshi Shimizutani, 2005. "Are People Insured Against Natural Disasters? Evidence from the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake in 1995," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-314, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    2. Yasuyuki Sawada, 2007. "The impact of natural and manmade disasters on household welfare," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 37(s1), pages 59-73, December.
    3. Goh, Chor-ching & Kang, Sung Jin & Sawada, Y asuyuki, 2005. "How did Korean households cope with negative shocks from the financial crisis?," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 239-254, April.
    4. Yasuyuki Sawada & Satoshi Shimizutani, 2007. "Consumption Insurance and Risk-Coping Strategies under Non-Separable Utility: Evidence from the Kobe Earthquake," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-512, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    5. Lee, Jeong-Joon & Sawada, Yasuyuki, 2010. "Precautionary saving under liquidity constraints: Evidence from rural Pakistan," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(1), pages 77-86, January.
    6. Yasuyuki Sawada & Satoshi Shimizutani, 2008. "How Do People Cope with Natural Disasters? Evidence from the Great Hanshin‐Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake in 1995," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 40(2‐3), pages 463-488, March.
    7. Orazio P. Attanasio & Guglielmo Weber, 2010. "Consumption and Saving: Models of Intertemporal Allocation and Their Implications for Public Policy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(3), pages 693-751, September.
    8. Jeong-Joon Lee & Yasuyuki Sawada, 2005. "Precautionary Saving under Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from Rural Pakistan (Published in "Journal of Development Economics". )," CARF F-Series CARF-F-051, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo.
    9. Alessandro Federici & Pierluigi Montalbano, 2012. "Macroeconomic volatility, consumption behaviour and welfare: A cross-country analysis," Working Paper Series 3612, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    10. Yasuyuki Sawada & Kazumitsu Nawata & Masako Ii & Jeong-Joon Lee, 2007. "Did the Credit Crunch in Japan Affect Household Welfare? An Augmented Euler Equation Approach Using Type 5 Tobit Model," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-498, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    11. Zimmerman, Frederick J. & Carter, Michael R., 2003. "Asset smoothing, consumption smoothing and the reproduction of inequality under risk and subsistence constraints," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(2), pages 233-260, August.
    12. Besley, Timothy, 1995. "Savings, credit and insurance," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Hollis Chenery & T.N. Srinivasan (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 36, pages 2123-2207, Elsevier.
    13. Sung Jin Kang & Yasuyuki Sawada, 2008. "Credit Crunch And Household Welfare, The Case Of The Korean Financial Crisis," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 59(4), pages 438-458, December.
    14. Dercon, Stefan & De Weerdt, Joachim & Bold, Tessa & Pankhurst, Alula, 2006. "Group-based funeral insurance in Ethiopia and Tanzania," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 685-703, April.
    15. Chou, Shin-Yi & Liu, Jin-Tan & Hammitt, James K., 2003. "National Health Insurance and precautionary saving: evidence from Taiwan," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(9-10), pages 1873-1894, September.
    16. Alba Lugilde & Roberto Bande & Dolores Riveiro, 2018. "Precautionary saving in Spain during the great recession: evidence from a panel of uncertainty indicators," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 1151-1179, December.
    17. Meghir, Costas & Pistaferri, Luigi, 2011. "Earnings, Consumption and Life Cycle Choices," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 9, pages 773-854, Elsevier.
    18. Emiliano Magrini & Pierluigi Montalbano, 2012. "Trade openness and vulnerability to poverty: Vietnam in the long-run (1992-2008)," Working Paper Series 3512, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    19. Levin, Mark (Левин, Марк) & Matrosova, Ksenia (Матросова, Ксения), 2018. "Development and Research of Economic Behavior of Households in Changing Conditions [Разработка И Исследование Экономического Поведения Домохозяйств В Изменяющихся Условиях]," Working Papers 041825, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
    20. Jonathan P. Thomas & Timothy Worrall, 2002. "Gift-giving, Quasi-credit and Reciprocity," Rationality and Society, , vol. 14(3), pages 308-352, August.

    More about this item

    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:esj:esridp:101. 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: HORI nobuko (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esrgvjp.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.