A COMPUTABLE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER

This research focused on some of the major consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and their effect on the Ukrainian economy. Specifically, it focused on the indirect longer-term impacts of the Chernobyl accident on every major sector of the economy. These impacts included changes in the supply, price, and import quantities of goods and services in different sectors of the economy; private consumption; public sector demand; investment; domestic market price, import and export prices, wage rate, return to capital, and wages. These results may be used by policy makers and other researchers to better understand the sectoral distribution of the impact of such disasters and provide resources where most needed. To estimate these indirect effects, state-of-the-art methods such as a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modeling were used. This was the first application of this methodology to the study of the Chernobyl accident.Several direct consequences were estimated: approximately 4,661 people are expected to have cancers attributable to Chernobyl in the 15 years following the accident. Another 9,281 people are expected to have other serious illnesses. Another important direct consequence is the decline in the birth rate coefficient, due mostly to the physiological effects of the disaster. The estimated decline in the birth coefficient due to Chernobyl was expected to be approximately 0.93 between 1986 and 1989 in Ukraine. This accounts for 24,309 workers. These direct effects were applied in simulations to estimate the sectoral distribution of the longer-term impacts. Without the Chernobyl accident, sectoral production would have been higher while prices would have been lower. Changes in production ranged between 0.1% and 1.7% depending on the scenario and sector. Generally, sectors can be divided into 3 categories: very sensitive, medium and low sensitive. Some sectors are more sensitive than others. This may be due to a specific structure in the economy and the intensity with which each sector is using labor and capital.