Natural disasters as a development opportunity: a spatial economic resilience interpretation

Alexandru Bănică, Karima Kourtit and Peter Nijkamp
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Alexandru Bănică: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, 2020, vol. 40, issue 2, No 6, 223-249

Abstract: Abstract Natural disasters are usually regarded as damage factors causing high private and social costs. Notwithstanding the incontestable validity of this premise, natural disasters do not necessarily lead to a structural deprivation of the area affected. Recent studies have clearly shown that in the long run one may even observe positive socio-economic effects (‘blessings in disguise’). This paper investigates this challenging proposition by developing a risk-disaster-opportunity framework for a territorial system, and by analysing the socio-economic impacts of natural shocks from a resilience perspective. This is inter alia done by designing a typology of natural disasters, and by presenting a systematic classification of long-range impacts. An empirical test of the above proposition of positive recovery effects of natural disasters is carried out by using, in particular, long-term data from the worldwide EM-DAT database. The attention is then focussed on positive feedback loops in spatial systems that are affected by a natural perturbation. Various case studies (USA, China, Haiti, Chile, Japan) are undertaken in order to test the existence of long-term ‘blessings in disguise’ effects, using in particular the HDI-index. In various cases, such positive effects appear to exist, depending on the effectiveness of public management of natural disaster phenomena.

Keywords: Natural disasters; Resilience; Blessing in disguise; Risk-disaster-opportunity framework; Recovery effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1007/s10037-020-00141-8

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