Factors affecting earthquake recovery: the Yao’an earthquake of China

Ying Wang (), Hao Chen and Juan Li

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2012, vol. 64, issue 1, 37-53

Abstract: Households vary in their ability to deal with disasters, and this may lead to different recovery results. Aiming to examine this differentiation, this paper studied the 2009 Yao’an earthquake in China. Surveys of 200 destroyed rural households were conducted in field investigations and follow-ups at 1 month, 1 year, and 1.5 years after the earthquake. The results showed a clear difference in recovery, the households observably being classified into five groups. These are the O group, which has different recovery time and economic cost from the other four; and the special group, comprising E L T O and E O T L (vulnerable during recovery); E H T O (strong during recovery); and E L T S (neither vulnerable nor strong). Logistic regression analysis revealed that differentiation in recovery patterns arose from the combined effect of demographic factors and external assistance provided to households. Lower income is the root cause of vulnerability in some households during the recovery process. However, other factors cause recovery differences between the two vulnerable groups, causing the economic recovery cost of the E L T O group to be lower, and the recovery time of the E O T L group to be longer. There was consensus that external assistance had an impact on all households. The more provided and the earlier it arrived, the lower the cost for recovery and the shorter the recovery time. This study shows that research on group differentiation of recovery is useful in understanding post-earthquake recovery processes and calls for taking group differentiation considerations into account in post-disaster recovery resource allocation practices. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Keywords: Recovery; Group differentiation; Earthquake; Factors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-012-0224-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:nathaz:v:64:y:2012:i:1:p:37-53

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-012-0224-3

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().