Abstract

Social, life and belongings lost in natural disasters are caused by the disaster itself and the ability of resistance to it. The loss extent caused by the same disaster is obviously different in different social economic environment. Based on data of 1991-2010, relationship between social economic environment and resistance to natural disasters is studied by panel data regression models. Furthermore, the social economic environmental factors which are likely to influence loss extent of natural disasters are analyzed. It is empirically shown that increase of Real GDP per capita, rural per capita net income, population of tertiary industry in GDP and number of doctors per thousand people all can decrease loss extent of natural disasters notably. However, increase of social fixed asset investment and increment speed of GDP cannot influence the loss extent prominently. Increase of disposable income decreases the death toll and the number of people affected by the disasters but enhances direct economic losses. Therefore, the influence of disposable income on the loss is not certain.

Keywords:

Empirical models, influence, loss extent, natural disasters, panel data analysis,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.