Cost of Disasters in China
From the existing scientific researches, people’s different understanding of natural disasters could be generally classified into two categories, one is from the perspective of scientific classification, and the other one is to understand natural disaster
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Cost of Disasters in China
30.1
Overview of the Cost of Disasters in China
From the existing scientific researches, people’s different understanding of natural disasters could be generally classified into two categories, one is from the perspective of scientific classification, and the other one is to understand natural disasters from the perspective of cross-disciplines. The former considers natural disaster as a kind of purely natural phenomenon; while the latter uses the method of system theory and understands disasters from the causes of disasters and their influence on the overall system as a sub-system of the overall society (for more details, please refer to Table 30.1). When we study natural disaster, we would not only study natural disaster itself, but also study the important influence generated from the interest relationship between human and nature, between different people, and between exchange and distribution, etc. From the viewpoint of economics, natural disaster essentially could be interpreted as a kind of economic issue, because the consequence eventually caused by natural disaster is loss of the human’s material fortune. Cost is defined by Economics as the entire expenses needed for producing a product, including the expenses invested for equipments, raw materials, labors, etc.1 Therefore, this book defines the cost of natural disaster as the entire expenses paid to prevent disaster, and for reconstruction during and after disaster as well as all the losses incurred hereof. China is one of the countries with the severest natural disasters in the world, the average annual economic loss caused from natural disasters is RMB 174.7 billion, accounting for about 3% of GDP, the ratios of disaster-striking agricultural area in total farming area and disaster-striking area exceed 20 and 50% respectively.
1
Xu Juan: Disaster Relief Input and Cost Issue in the Economics of Disasters, Science of Disaster, 2nd Issue, Volume 21, 2006. © People’s Publishing House and Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 G. Hu, The Cost of Development in China, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4175-4_30
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Cost of Disasters in China
Table 30.1 Definition of natural disaster from different perspectives No.
Perspective of pure natural phenomenon
Interdisciplinary perspective
1
Disaster is a kind of natural phenomenon, having close correlation with human being, and would usually bring harm to human survival or damage human’s living environmenta
Disasters occur in human’s living environment, and often correlated with change of social environment, they would be intensified with the complication of social environment, and may also have new types of disastersb
2
Disasters are some physical geographic events that are far beyond human’s expectation, no matter what kind of scale and frequency they have, they would bring obvious material destruction and life loss to human, so as to place human in painful statec
Disaster is normally interpreted as a kind of natural event that would cause life or property loss to people, and mos
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