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  Geotimes - October 2007 - Democracy, GDP and Natural Disasters

Democracy, GDP and Natural Disasters
Gregory E. van der Vink and co-authors

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Image Caption and Credit Below
U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman Patrick M. Bonafede
This aerial view of the countryside south of Banda Aceh, Sumatra, shows the devastation left in the wake of the tsunami and earthquake that struck the area on Dec. 26, 2004. The tsunami was the sixth worst natural disaster when ranked according to deaths per million.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998 with the observation that there has never been a famine in a nation that has a democratic form of government and a free press. A similar relationship exists for natural disasters: Deaths associated with natural disasters are lower for nations with democratic forms of government and the associated higher national income, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In general, the World Bank’s Democracy Index, a measure of how strong a democracy is, and a nation’s GDP are stronger predictors of a natural disaster’s humanitarian impact (as measured by deaths) than either the size of the event or the population density in the area of the disaster. Global increases in democracy and GDP may therefore partially explain the apparent paradox of the generally decreasing death toll associated with natural disasters despite the increased population density in high-risk areas.

Natural Disasters


Clearly, the impact of a natural disaster is not simply a function of the natural event itself, but is determined also by society’s ability to respond to the disaster. Over the same time period that we observe a decreasing number of disaster deaths, two great global socioeconomic trends of the last half century have also occurred: democratization and economic development. To evaluate the role that democracy and economic development play in reducing the humanitarian impact of natural disasters, we measured 133 countries’ natural disaster death tolls against both their average democracy ranking and their average per capita GDP. We excluded only those nations with a population of fewer than 1 million people, or which have experienced five or fewer disasters between 1964 and 2004.

The Role of Democracy

El Salvador also stands out as an outlier. Despite its democratic ranking, the impoverished nation experiences a large number of deaths in the aftermath of a natural disaster. El Salvador does not have a very high democracy rating (-0.1) in general compared to the global median (-0.3). (By contrast, the U.S. democracy index is 1.4, and Finland, which has the world’s highest democracy index, is 2.47.) In fact, El Salvador’s democracy ranking may be misleading in the context of this analysis. Its democratic constitution was drafted only in 1983, after a long period of political instability and civil war.


Image Caption and Credit Below
Mark Koenig
Flooding in Nepal from last summer’s monsoons killed hundreds and left millions across Southeast Asia homeless. Regions such as Nepal’s Bardiya District in the southwest were particularly hard hit. New research indicates that countries with lower per capita GDP and a lower democracy index are more likely to face a lot of deaths when a disaster strikes than richer countries with stronger democracies.

In contrast, the three costliest disasters occurred in countries that are highly developed and highly democratic — the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in the United States and an earthquake in southern Italy in 1980. However, the three costliest disasters resulted in a relatively miniscule number of deaths. The dichotomy is striking: Natural disasters that occur in undeveloped, non-democratic nations result in a high humanitarian cost but a low economic cost, whereas natural disasters that occur in developed, democratic nations result in a low humanitarian cost but a high economic cost. There is clearly a link between democracy, development and the impact of natural disasters.

The strong exponential correlation between democracy and GDP makes it difficult to resolve the determining factor. In addition, the reason for the strong correlation between the World Bank’s Democracy Index and per capita GDP is not fully known. Similarly, it is difficult to determine exactly which of the factors that go into the calculation of the World Bank’s Democracy Index have the greatest influence in determining the relationship to the death toll. These considerations are beyond the resolution of our analysis. What is clear, however, is that the death tolls associated with natural disasters are undeniably linked to level of democratic rule within the nation that the disaster occurs.

The relationship between the humanitarian impact of a natural disaster and the democracy of the nation in which the disaster occurs is consistent with the relationship that Amartya Sen discovered between democracy and famine. Deaths from natural disasters are more likely to occur in nations with low levels of democratic rule. Furthermore, we also calculated the pattern of humanitarian relief aid from both the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) — the U.S. Agency for International Development’s disaster assistance department — and the U.N. World Food Programme: The analysis indicates that the populations of less democratic nations are more vulnerable to natural disasters.



Reducing Hazard Vulnerability

If famines are almost entirely within the control of governments and citizens, how are we to understand what are collectively referred to as “natural disasters”? Such events as earthquakes, windstorms (hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tornadoes), landslides, volcanic eruptions, floods and droughts are referred to as “natural,” implying that they are beyond the sphere of human influence and agency. But are they really? No state or society can prevent the occurrence of an event such as a hurricane or an earthquake. That is beyond the range of human capability.

But one can not argue that disasters are wholly independent of human action. After all, a disaster is only a disaster if it affects humans themselves. That is, any natural disaster is the intersection of a natural event and a human population. But if we cannot prevent the event itself, we can certainly influence — reduce or exacerbate, depending on the circumstances — the impact of the immutable event.


If the impact of natural disasters in humanitarian and economic terms is not solely natural, then there exists a clear opportunity for societies and communities at all scales, from familial to global, to influence the impact. We have to capitalize upon this remarkable opportunity to effect change, ensuring that the influence is a positive one and that more lives are saved and not lost.

Vulnerability to natural hazards includes not only the risk of an event — the risk involves both the probability of occurrence and how much infrastructure, both societal and economic, is exposed — but also the resiliency of the infrastructure and the national capacity to respond. Governments with low levels of accountability to their citizens may feel less pressure to maintain a high-level capacity for response to the humanitarian impact of natural disasters.


Image Caption and Credit Below
Gregory E. van der Vink and co-authors
While the number of natural disasters worldwide is increasing, the number of deaths associated with natural disasters is decreasing.  For the purpose of this analysis, we restrict the use of “natural disaster” to droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides, volcanoes, wave/surges, wildfires and wind storms (including hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, tornadoes and winter storms). Natural disaster data is from the Emergency Disaster Database (EM-DAT), maintained by the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The disaster value plot­ted is the annual total of EM-DAT-recorded di­sasters from 1964 to 2004. The normalized global disaster death plotted is the number of EM-DAT-recorded disaster deaths divided by the annual global population values provided by the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

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Image Caption and Credit Below
Gregory E. van der Vink and co-authors
Countries that have suffered the greatest loss of life from natural disasters are those with low democracy indices and low gross domestic products (GDP). The impact, abbreviated as DPE, is measured by total deaths divided by total events normalized to population per country. The linear trend is due to the strong correlation between democracy and GDP. Each dot (133) represents a nation. Each country’s normalized death toll was determined by dividing the total disaster deaths from 1964 through 2004 by the average national population value, determined from World Development Indicators (WDI) population data for that time period. The Death per Event (DPE) plotted is the normalized death toll divided by the total number of disasters experienced by a country from 1964 through 2004. The size of each dot is proportional to the number of deaths per event as normalized to the country’s population at the time of the event.

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Image Caption and Credit Below
Gregory E. van der Vink and co-authors
U.S. aid provided by the Office of Foreign Disaster Aid (OFDA) (green line) is generally responsive (with slight time-delay due to reporting dates) to the humanitarian impact of disasters, especially since 1981. The spike in 2004 is the Indian Ocean tsunami in December of that year. OFDA aid for that event was not recorded until the next year, so it is not included on the figure. Mortality was plotted as the global number of deaths per 1,000 people (thus normalizing for population growth). Aid was plotted as dollars (2004 adjusted) given per million dollars of world GDP (thus normalizing for economic growth). Death data was retrieved from EM-DAT database. Aid data retrieved from 1964 to 2004 OFDA database.

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Image Caption and Credit Below
Gregory E. van der Vink and co-authors
Most U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Aid and U.N. World Food Programme disaster relief grants go to countries with low democracy values. Each country was assigned a democracy value according to the average value of its six World Bank indicators at the time of the received grant. Each individual aid grant from 1987 to 2004 was then assigned a category depending on the democratic value of the recipient country at the time of the grant. The normalized number of grants plotted is the number of grants in each category divided by the number of countries that fall into that category.

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