Examining Vulnerability Factors to Natural Disasters with a Spatial Autoregressive Model: The Case of South Korea

Seunghoo Jeong and D. K. Yoon
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Seunghoo Jeong: School of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Korea
D. K. Yoon: Department of Urban Planning and Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Korea

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-13

Abstract: Socially and economically marginalized people and environmentally vulnerable areas are disproportionately affected by natural hazards. Identifying populations and places vulnerable to disasters is important for disaster management, and crucial for mitigating their economic consequences. From the fields of geography, emergency management, and urban planning, several approaches and methodologies have been used to identify significant vulnerability factors affecting the incidence and impact of disasters. This study performs a regression analysis to examine several factors associated with disaster damage in 230 local communities in South Korea, using ten vulnerability indicators for social, economic, and environmental aspects, and a single indicator for disaster characteristics. A Lagrange Multiplier diagnostic test-based spatial autoregressive model (SAM) was applied to assess the potential spatial autocorrelation in the ordinary least squares (OLS) residuals. This study compared the OLS regression results with those of a spatial autoregressive model, for both presence of spatial autocorrelation, and model performance. The conclusion of this study is that Korean communities with a higher vulnerability to disasters, as a result of their socioeconomic and environmental characteristics, are more likely to experience economic losses from natural disasters.

Keywords: natural disasters; vulnerability; spatial autoregressive model (SAM); South Korea (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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