Natural disasters have a statistically observable adverse impact on the macro-economy in the short-run. Not surprisingly, costlier events cause more pronounced slowdowns in production. Yet, interestingly, developing countries, and smaller economies, face much larger output declines following a...

We compare the realised impact of terrorism and disasters linked to natural hazards. Using fifty years of data from two databases covering 99 percent of the global population, we find that natural hazard disasters were more then 20 times more impactful than terrorism. The former had a larger...

Economics, generally, is a discipline in which relatively little attention is devoted to language and terminology. As such, economists have not really attempted to define the concept of disasters very carefully, nor have they evaluated the ethics that are behind the economic analysis of...

The Pacific Islands face the highest disaster risk, in per capita terms, globally. Examples of catastrophic events in the region include the 2009 tsunami in Samoa, the 2014 floods in the Solomon Islands, and the 2015 cyclone Pam in Vanuatu. Even without these catastrophic events, countries in...