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Does a Natural Disaster Affect GDP of Southeast Asian Countries?

Asian and Pacific countries continue to suffer disproportionately from disasters caused by natural disasters. Disasters causedeath, economic and environmental damage, and severe setbacks for social development. The aim of this paper is to study whether the impact of natural disasters is negative in relation to the GDP ofSoutheast Asian countries with similar characteristics. People in developing countries within this region experience a constant effect from natural disasters in their national economy. The intensity of theseevents is usually higher in smaller countries. Considering that most of these islands are relatively small, a big part of their GDP is concentrated within a single city, therefore when they areaffected by natural disasters these create an economically significant impact in their national economies. Among policymakers, these rare events are often explicitly or implicitly blamed for the good orbad economic performance of these countries. Do these natural disasters affect differently the GDP of the nations within the Southeast Asian region? Although there has been a steady increase in thenumber of researchers tackling these questions, the effects of rare events on economic development and GDP remain unclear. There are some studies reporting negative effects while others report no effector even positive effects, and most of them focus only in big nations like Japan or Indonesia. There is no much information about smaller countries, which are more drastically affected by these events.The purpose of this paper is to show that these seemingly contradictory findings can be reconciled by exploring the effects of disasters on GDP separately by categories within countries. This studyexamines the economic impact of natural disasters on different Southeast Asian nations with different patterns of economic vulnerability. The answer to this question is important not only for...