Deaths from natural disasters: How important are income, income inequality and geography?

Hebe Nicholson (), Nick Hanley, Laure Kuhfuss and Allan Findlay
Additional contact information
Hebe Nicholson: School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St. Andrews
Allan Findlay: School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St. Andrews

Discussion Papers in Environment and Development Economics from University of St. Andrews, School of Geography and Sustainable Development

Abstract: This paper analyses the role of income, income inequality and geography in explaining recent time trends in global hazards from natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes. We seek to explain a pattern in the data which shows a decline in such disasters from the early 2000s across 73 countries, despite increasing pressures from climate change. Using a zero-inflated negative binomial model and a generalized least squared regression model, we show that income and income inequality both have significant effects on the number of disasters and on deaths from natural hazards; but that geographical factors also play an important role. It seems from the data as if countries can reduce expected deaths from natural disasters by increasing average incomes and by improving the fairness with which such income is distributed. However, results for the geographical variables suggest that this “escape route” is not equally open to all countries.

Keywords: Natural disasters; natural hazards; income growth; income inequality; self-protection; zero inflated negative binomial models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/dept-of-geograp ... son%20et%20alpdf.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sss:wpaper:2017-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Environment and Development Economics from University of St. Andrews, School of Geography and Sustainable Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Laure Kuhfuss ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).