Impact of Economic Development Levels and Disaster Types on the Short-Term Macroeconomic Consequences of Natural Hazard-Induced Disasters in China

The relationship between natural hazard-induced disasters and macroeconomic growth has been examined widely on global and national scales, but little research has been focused on the subnational level, especially in China. We examined the impacts of natural hazard-induced disasters on the regional growth in China based on subnational panel data for the period from 1990 to 2016. First, we used the number of people affected and the direct economic losses as the measures of the scale of disasters. Then, we used the direct damages of meteorological disasters and earthquakes as disaster measures separately to examine the impacts of different disaster types. Finally, we performed intraregional effects regressions to observe the spatial heterogeneity within the regions. The results show that the adverse short-term effects of disasters is most pronounced in the central region, while the direct damage of disasters is a positive stimulus of growth in the whole of China. However, this stimulus is observed in a lagged way and is reflected differently—meteorological disasters in central and eastern China and earthquakes in western China are related to regional growth. The results demonstrate that the short-term macroeconomic impacts of these disasters in the three geographical regions of China largely depend on regional economic development levels and the disaster types.