State capacity and vulnerability to natural disasters

Richard Tol

Chapter 20 in Handbook on the Economics of Disasters, 2022, pp 434-457 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Many empirical studies have shown that government quality is a key determinant of vulnerability to natural disasters. Protection against natural disasters can be a public good--flood protection, for example - or a natural monopoly - early warning systems, for instance. Recovery from natural disasters is easier when the financial system is well-developed, particularly insurance services. This requires a strong legal and regulatory environment. This chapter reviews the empirical literature to find that government quality and democracy reduce vulnerability to natural disasters while corruption of public officials increases vulnerability. The chapter complements the literature by including tax revenue as an explanatory variable for vulnerability to natural disasters, and by modelling both the probability of natural disaster and the damage done. Countries with a larger public sector are better at preventing extreme events from doing harm. Countries that take more of their revenue in income taxes are better that reducing harm from natural disasters

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Environment; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781839103735/9781839103735.00033.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
Working Paper: State capacity and vulnerability to natural disasters (2021)
Working Paper: State capacity and vulnerability to natural disasters (2021)
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:elg:eechap:19599_20

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().