The impact of a disaster recovery policy on health status of the 2015 Gorkha earthquake victims: Evidence from a natural experiment

Qiong Huang, Gautam Bhandari, Ghulam Dastgir Khan and Yuichiro Yoshida

Review of Development Economics, 2025, vol. 29, issue 1, 435-449

Abstract: The 2015 Gorkha earthquake destroyed key infrastructure in Greater Kathmandu and the surrounding earthquake‐affected areas, undermining the health status of affected households. As one of the disaster recovery policies, the Nepalese government distributed taxi permits to severely affected households through a lottery. Leveraging on this natural experimental setting, we examine the impact of the policy on their health status and access to health services. The results show that the treated households have fewer chronic and diarrhoeal diseases, and fewer doctor visits. However, we find no significant difference in the households' medical expenditure between the two groups. We also find that rural households with the taxi permits benefit more from the policy. The results of this study may provide policymakers with some insight to enhance their post‐disaster recovery strategy.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rode.13136

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:bla:rdevec:v:29:y:2025:i:1:p:435-449

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1363-6669

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Development Economics is currently edited by E. Kwan Choi

More articles in Review of Development Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().