Economische gevolgen van de aardbeving/tsunami in Japan

On the whole, the disaster lit says that the growth effect of disasters depends. Poor countries with weak institutions rocked by calamity may lack the material resources and organisational wherewithal to get back to the status quo ante, in which case the disaster is likely to have profoundly negative long-term effects. (Think Haiti.) As one would expect, rich countries with high-quality institutions and populations with high levels of human and social capital recover more quickly, and are most likely to intelligently allocate resources toward improvements over lost capital stock and infrastructure. (Think Japan.) But, of course, recovery from a disaster that kills a huge number of highly-skilled people cannot be accomplished by simply replacing the dead with newer, more highly-skilled models. And, not surprisingly, the scale of the disaster matters. The bigger the human and economic loss, the longer it takes to return back to trend. So far, this 2010 paper on " Catastrophic Natural Disasters and Economic Growth" by Eduardo Cavallo, Ilan Noy, Sebastian Galiani, and Juan Pantano is the best I have found. Comparing the actual growth path of a large number of disaster-beset countries with carefully-estimated counterfactual, disaster-free growth paths, the authors find that: [O]nly very large natural disasters followed by radical political revolution show long-lasting negative economic effects on economic growth. Even very large natural disasters, when not followed by disruptive political reforms that alter the economic system, including the system or property rights, do not display significant effects on economic growth. ... Thus, we conclude that unless a natural disaster triggers a radical political revolution; it is unlikely to affect economic growth. Of course, this conclusion does not neglect the direct cost of natural disasters such as the lives lost and the costs of reconstruction that often are quite large. There is every reason to believe Japan will eventually fully recover economically. Eventually. I highlight the last sentence in the pasage above to emphasize that the return to trend economic growth does not compensate for the direct human and economic loss created by the disaster. In the case of Japan, the final toll will be immense. The unofficial death toll is up to 10,000, and more than 15,000 people remain unaccounted for. Economists at Barclays have estimated the loss at 15 trillion yen, or about $186 billion—about 3% of Japanese GDP. And the costs of the ongoing knock-on disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant remain unclear. This is horrific pure loss at a sickening scale. There is no silver lining in this.

Direct damages -- i.e., the damage to fixed assets and capital, to raw materials and extractable natural resources, and most importantly mortality and morbidity -- are typically much larger in less developed countries, and countries with a weakened institutional capacity. A comparison of the damages caused by the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile easily demonstrates this point. The dramatically different outcomes, 240,000 people dead as compared with around 500, originated at least partially from different policies, institutional arrangements, and economic conditions. This makes the Sendai earthquake unusual, since it caused very significant damage in a very prosperous country, and one that is typically considered very well prepared to mitigate these events. While the final death toll is still unclear, it appears it will be quite significantly larger than the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the most fatal natural disaster to hit a developed country in many years (when about 6400 people died). When compared to the research on short-run indirect impacts, the literature on the long-run effects of natural disasters is scant and its results inconclusive. The most recent attempts to evaluate the long-run impact of disasters on GDP suggest that there is no evidence of an adverse impact

Given the findings described above, one can conclude that the likely indirect impacts of this horrific earthquake/tsunami event on growth in the Japanese economy will be quite minimal. The Japanese government and the Japanese people have access to large amounts of human and financial resources that can be directed toward a rapid and robust reconstruction and rebuilding of the affected region. Neither do we have any evidence to suggest that the earthquake is likely to have any enduring monetary effects. This observation, however, does not preclude enduring regional impacts. In addition to these potentially permanent regional impacts, of course, this disaster may have impact on other macro-economic aggregates. The fiscal expansion that will follow this disaster will further increase the Japanese government's debt levels, but since this debt largely stays in Japan, and since households (especially credit-constrained households are likely to 'tighten their belts' and reduce consumption temporarily, these other affects are unlikely to be enduring as well. One caveat is worth mentioning here: We still do not know what will be the impact of the enfolding crisis in the various nuclear reactors that have been affected. The analysis above ignored this danger, though the still present devastation in Chernobyl attests to its potentially destructive powers.