Chapter 2: Measuring Disasters’ Many Effects
on the sequence of repairs and on whether to change the location and resilience of structures. These decisions will affect what firms and people do. So, assessing the damage to public infrastructure, and the costs of repairs and rebuilding is urgent, to efficiently implement public measures for recovery. And this requires quickly assessing the impact of a disaster on a government’s fiscal position. But repairs to public infrastructure cannot be instantaneous—the costs are spread over time. Governments in developing countries struggle to raise taxes for the 10 to 20 percent of GDP they typically spend, so even if costs of repairing public infrastructure are spread over time (or financed through borrowing), damage assessments should examine the disaster’s fiscal implications for the public sector and the ability to finance recovery—keeping in mind that fiscal revenues depend on national output, which will not fall as much as that in the affected area. A frequent purpose of damage assessment is compensation: with much of the damage to private property, governments may wish to compensate at least the poorest for the damage they incurred. Whether it is useful to try to comprehensively value damage to private property is questionable. Setting aside the complexities of measurement and biases, compensation is seldom linked to damage. While it may be desirable to limit such transfers to those who are both poor and have incurred damage (a subset of those in the affected area), distinguishing between the chronically and the temporarily poor is difficult. And it would be unfortunate if such spending displaced that on adequate infrastructure and its maintenance—especially since their neglect increases vulnerability to future disasters. Not everything needs to be measured or valued in a desire to be comprehensive for governments to help people directly. Indeed, damage assessments could be more useful if they were simpler. Finally, damage assessments are often conducted as a prelude to foreign aid. However, if donors seek instead to help a country achieve more than a recovery to the status quo ante, then damage estimates, especially if based on pre-disaster measures of output and asset values, may not be that informative. Recognizing the limits of damage assessments would also enhance their value.
Individuals over the edge Studies on the short- to medium- term effects of a disaster on poverty abound.3 Many survivors of disasters, rich and poor, recover fully, but a few do not. Healthy people survive temporary deprivation, but elder people and women are particularly vulnerable. Even temporary malnourishment could permanently stunt growth and lower cognitive abilities among children younger than three. While much has been written on short-run effects, panel data to examine the longer term effects on human welfare, some more subtle than others, are scant; but the absence of data does not mean the absence of a problem. Some new studies explore the sufferings of survivors, particularly children.
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