Climate change is causing more frequent and devastating natural disasters. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it examines the dynamic effects of natural disasters on the growth of output and its components. Government expenditure in advanced economies (AEs) rises immediately in the same...

We explore the effect of (big) shocks on the allocation of (bilateral) aid using natural disasters as natural experiments. We find that aid commitment statistically significantly increases following natural disasters, and that humanitarian aid precedes structural aid. While we find that the...

For governments, the occurrence of natural disasters creates the opportunity to demonstrate their willingness and competence in providing prompt and efficient disaster aid. A number of studies has investigated the political consequences of providing disaster aid by analyzing the effects of such...

Data shows that there has been a five-fold increase in the number of climate-related disasters that the world has witnessed over the last fifty years. Just between 2000 and 2019, 7,348 reported disasters caused 1.23 million deaths, affecting a population of 4.03 billion and causing economic...

The study provides forward-looking estimates for economic damages from floods and tropical cyclones (TC) for a wide range of countries using global datasets. Damages are estimated for three Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios and aggregated at the country level, building...

The year 2023 marks the 12th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE). Immediately after the disaster, the number of evacuees reached approximately 470,000, but by November 2022, the number had decreased to approximately 31,000. The reconstruction of housing, disposal of debris,...

This diagnostic report was prepared in response to a technical assistance request from the Government of the Republic of Namibia (GRN) to support the design and implementation of an index-based agriculture insurance program targeting small-scale farmers. Based on initial consultations with the...

In contrast with findings in climate science, economists often treat losses from natural disasters as statistically independent of one another. To better incorporate scientific insights into economic research, we introduce a methodology to identify spatial and temporal clusters in datasets on...

In this paper, we study the implications of climate change on fiscal sustainability and inequality. First, using rich panel data, we show that rising climate-related disaster risks increase government debt and harm fiscal sustainability. We also find that the adverse effect of disaster risks is...

Recently, there is a growing interest in understanding how individuals adapt to changing climate conditions and climate-induced extreme weather events, An underexplored question is whether and how climate-related natural hazards affect household saving behavior, For this purpose, we exploit a...

Following the Herat province (Western Afghanistan) earthquake sequence of October 7 to 15, 2023, the World Bank carried out a remote desk-based assessment of the physical damages using the Global RApid post-disaster Damage Estimation (GRADE) methodology. The objective of the assessment is to...

Disasters are frequent and clearly harmful in developing countries, but precisely estimating their overall cost and distributional impact is challenging. This paper proposes a microsimulation approach to do so rapidly, borrowing concepts from both poverty analysis and urban economics. Because...

Extremely severe cyclonic storm Mocha made landfall as a Category 4-equivalent cyclone in the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale on Sunday May 14, 2023, at 07:07 UTC (14:07 local time) around Sittwe city, the capital of Rakhine State, Myanmar. Given the fragile and conflict-affected situation...

This paper examines the socioeconomic factors correlated with vulnerability to natural hazards, using unique data from the High-Frequency Phone Surveys conducted in Haiti in 2021, 2022, and 2023. The results indicate a high overall exposure to hazards, with a significant number of individuals...

The standard approach to 'nowcast' disaster impacts, which relies on risk models, does not typically account for the compounding impact of various hazard phenomena (e.g., wind and rainfall associated with tropical storms). The alternative, traditionally, has been a team of experts sent to the...

This article presents a novel data set that describes insurance industry-wide trends on the pervasive and material inadequacy of homeowner insurance. A large majority of insured homes in the United States are profoundly underinsured, and the homeowners do not know it. Insurance companies have...

Background: This paper proposes a framework to cope with the lack of data at the time of a disaster by employing predictive models. The framework can be used for disaster human impact assessment based on the socio-economic characteristics of the affected countries. Methods: A panel data of 4252...

The Government of Malawi put in place a mechanism that enables its flagship unconditional cash transfer program-the Social Cash Transfer Program (SCTP)—to scale up response to additional beneficiaries when shocks occur. Making the SCTP shock-responsive is a key strategic pillar of the...

In today's global environment, countries face various shocks, such as natural hazards, economic and health crises, conflict, violence, and forced displacement. Disasters triggered by natural hazards cause billions of dollars in damage per year, and these disasters, and their costs, are...

We study Puerto Rico's experience after the severe hurricane season of 2017 to better understand how extreme weather disasters affect bank stability and their ability to lend. Despite the devastation wrought by two category 5 hurricanes in a single month, we find relatively modest and transitory...

This chapter describes tools and a methodology to model wind and flood risks from tropical storms under present and future climate accounting for natural infrastructure. Wind forcing provide a crucial link to hydrodynamic models that can be used in risk assessments to estimate extent of and...