The changing effect of legal origin on death tolls in natural disasters from 1960 to 2008.

Persistent institutions, which are captured by legal origin, are considered to influence the occurrence and intensity of economic crises. However, little is known about how changes in legal origin affect processes of economic development. Using non-European country data, this paper investigates the effect of legal origin on natural disaster death tolls from 1960 to 2008, and on the two periods 1960–1989 and 1990–2008. The key findings are that natural disaster death tolls are higher in French legal origin countries than in other countries in 1990–2008, but not in 1960–1989. This implies that the role of legal origin, in reducing the level of damage in a disaster, changes according to technological progress.