Droughts are frequent and severe in many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and have a devastating impact on their peoples and economies. The extreme vulnerability to rainfall in the arid and semiarid areas of the continent and the poor capacity of most African soils to retain moisture result...

The study described here examines the short- and long-term economic, and financial impacts of natural disasters. It relies in part, on in-depth case studies of overall sensitivity to natural hazards in the small island economy of Dominica; public finance consequences of disasters in Bangladesh;...

Two worldwide trends in recent decades are commonly noted and sometimes linked in discussing disasters. First, the reported global cost of natural disasters has risen significantly, with a 14-fold increase between the 1950s and 1990s ( Munich Re, 1999 ). During the 1990s, major natural...