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Natural Disasters and Economic Growth―An Empirical Study Using Provincial Panel Data of China

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Economic Impacts and Emergency Management of Disasters in China

Abstract

Natural disasters have been happening more frequently in the world in recent years. Different groups of economists have different opinions towards the economic impact after these natural disasters. One group believes that natural disasters will promote the economic growth in the area where natural disasters occurred and the other believes strongly that natural disasters will hinder economic growth. In this paper, we based on the provincial panel data between 2000 and 2010 in China including 31 provinces and categorized natural disasters into two different groups, i.e. meteorological and geological disasters. It has been found that meteorological disasters promote economic growth through the accumulation of physical capital, while the geological disasters have been found with no significant relationship economic growth of the local economy.

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Acknowledgements

Hui Liu, Xianhua Wu, Jiong Gu, Shunfeng Song, Yinshan Tang, Huai Deng also made great contributions to this manuscript. We express our heartfelt thanks to them. This study was supported by the National Social and Scientific Fund Program (18ZDA052; 17BGL142;16ZDA047; 11CGL100), Natural Science Foundation of China(91546117,71373131; 71140014, 91024020), National soft Scientific Fund Program(2011GXQ4B025), National Industry-specific Topics (GYHY200806017), Ministry of Social Science Project Youth Fund (09YJC 630128) and China Postdoctoral Foundation(20090461132). This study was also supported by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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Wu, X., Guo, J. (2021). Natural Disasters and Economic Growth―An Empirical Study Using Provincial Panel Data of China. In: Economic Impacts and Emergency Management of Disasters in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1319-7_3

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