IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/6852.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Economic resilience: definition and measurement

Author

Listed:
  • Hallegatte, Stephane

Abstract

The welfare impact of a disaster does not only depend on the physical characteristics of the event or its direct impacts in terms of lost lives and assets. Welfare impacts also depend on the ability of the economy to cope, recover, and reconstruct and therefore to minimize aggregate consumption losses. This ability can be referred to as the macroeconomic resilience to natural disasters. Macroeconomic resilience has two components: instantaneous resilience, which is the ability to limit the magnitude of immediate production losses for a given amount of asset losses, and dynamic resilience, which is the ability to reconstruct and recover. Welfare impacts also depend on micro-economic resilience, which depends on the distribution of losses; on households'vulnerability, such as their pre-disaster income and ability to smooth shocks over time with savings, borrowing, and insurance, and on the social protection system, or the mechanisms for sharing risks across the population. The (economic) welfare disaster risk in a country can be reduced by reducing the exposure or vulnerability of people and assets (reducing asset losses), increasing macroeconomic resilience (reducing aggregate consumption losses for a given level of asset losses), or increasing microeconomic resilience (reducing welfare losses for a given level of aggregate consumption losses). The paper proposes rules of thumb to estimate macroeconomic and microeconomic resilience based on the relevant parameters in the economy. It also provides a toolbox of policies to increase macro- or micro-economic resilience and a list of indicators that can be used to build a resilience indicator.

Suggested Citation

  • Hallegatte, Stephane, 2014. "Economic resilience: definition and measurement," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6852, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6852
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2014/05/02/000158349_20140502133741/Rendered/PDF/WPS6852.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Avi J. Cohen, 2003. "Retrospectives: Whatever Happened to the Cambridge Capital Theory Controversies?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 199-214, Winter.
    2. Hallegatte, Stéphane & Dumas, Patrice, 2009. "Can natural disasters have positive consequences? Investigating the role of embodied technical change," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(3), pages 777-786, January.
    3. Henriet, Fanny & Hallegatte, Stéphane & Tabourier, Lionel, 2012. "Firm-network characteristics and economic robustness to natural disasters," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 150-167.
    4. Jose-Miguel Albala-Bertrand, 2014. "Disasters and the Networked Economy. A Book Summary," Working Papers 718, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    5. Dercon, Stefan, 2004. "Growth and shocks: evidence from rural Ethiopia," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 309-329, August.
    6. World Bank, 2013. "Building Resilience : Integrating Climate and Disaster Risk into Development
      [Crear resiliencia mediante la integración de los riesgos climáticos y de desastre en el proceso de desarrollo - Resumen      ," World Bank Other Operational Studies 16639, The World Bank.
    7. Stine Aakre & Ilona Banaszak & Reinhard Mechler & Dirk Rübbelke & Anita Wreford & Harvir Kalirai, 2010. "Financial adaptation to disaster risk in the European Union," Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer, vol. 15(7), pages 721-736, October.
    8. Mark Skidmore & Hideki Toya, 2002. "Do Natural Disasters Promote Long-Run Growth?," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 40(4), pages 664-687, October.
    9. Hallegatte, Stéphane & Ghil, Michael, 2008. "Natural disasters impacting a macroeconomic model with endogenous dynamics," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(1-2), pages 582-592, December.
    10. Eduardo Rodriguez-Oreggia & Alejandro De La Fuente & Rodolfo De La Torre & Hector A. Moreno, 2013. "Natural Disasters, Human Development and Poverty at the Municipal Level in Mexico," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(3), pages 442-455, March.
    11. repec:eee:reensy:v:125:y:2014:i:c:p:92-102 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Stéphane Hallegatte & Nicola Ranger & Sumana Bhattacharya & Murthy Bachu & Satya Priya & K. Dhore & Farhat Rafique & P. Mathur & Nicolas Naville & Fanny Henriet & Anand Patwardhan & K. Narayanan & Sub, 2010. "Flood Risks, Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Benefits in Mumbai: An Initial Assessment of Socio-Economic Consequences of Present and Climate Change Induced Flood Risks and of Possible Adaptation," OECD Environment Working Papers 27, OECD Publishing.
    13. Adam Rose & Dan Wei, 2013. "Estimating The Economic Consequences Of A Port Shutdown: The Special Role Of Resilience," Economic Systems Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(2), pages 212-232, June.
    14. Kroll, Cynthia A. & Landis, John D. & Shen, Qing & Stryker, Sean, 1991. "Economic Impacts of the Loma Prieta Earthquake: A Focus on Small Businesses," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt05f3382m, University of California Transportation Center.
    15. Battiston, Stefano & Delli Gatti, Domenico & Gallegati, Mauro & Greenwald, Bruce & Stiglitz, Joseph E., 2007. "Credit chains and bankruptcy propagation in production networks," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 2061-2084, June.
    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. repec:eee:ecolec:v:140:y:2017:i:c:p:66-78 is not listed on IDEAS

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic Theory&Research; Natural Disasters; Climate Change Economics; Insurance&Risk Mitigation; Labor Policies;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:wbk:wbrwps:6852. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Roula I. Yazigi). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.