Catastrophic Risks and Insurance,

The present study seeks to build on earlier work by identifying the factors associated with the frequency of natural disasters and the resulting mortality. Drawing together the main findings, some observations are made from a policy perspective to focus on key elements of a disaster reduction strategy. Countries that were prone to natural disasters in the previous decade (1970-79) continued to be so in the next two decades. Geophysical factors (e.g. whether landlocked, distance to coast) had an important role in explaining inter-country variation in the occurrence of natural disasters. However, income did not have any effect. Deaths varied with the number of disasters; they also varied with (lagged) deaths in the previous decade, pointing to (presumably) persistent government failures in preventing deaths where the deaths were high; poor countries suffered more deaths, controlling for these and other effects; larger countries suffered more deaths. The pay-off from learning from past experience is high, as reflected in the elasticity of deaths to disasters. Even moderate learning can save a large number of deaths (e.g. through early warnin