Abstract
This paper studies the impact of preemptive investment against natural disasters on the future occurrence of landslides and the losses associated with it. Based on a panel of 746 Colombian municipalities with medium and high risk of landslides and an instrumental variable approach, we find that preemptive public investment can reduce the number of landslides, the number of people who die, are injured, or missing after a landslide, as well as the number of people affected. However, we do not find it has any effect on the number of houses destroyed. The results reveal that local governments focus their preventive measures on saving the lives and the physical integrity of their citizens, but they pay less attention to the direct market losses of natural disasters. These results are relevant in the presence of imperfect private insurance markets and increased informal settlements.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1087-1103 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Papers in Regional Science |
| Volume | 101 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2022 |
Keywords
- disaster risk reduction
- landslides
- natural disasters
- preemptive investment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Environmental Science (miscellaneous)