Ex-Post Coping Responses and Post-Disaster Resilience: a Case from the 2015 Nepal Earthquake
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Ex-Post Coping Responses and Post-Disaster Resilience: a Case from the 2015 Nepal Earthquake Veeshan Rayamajhee 1
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& Alok K. Bohara & Virgil Henry Storr
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Received: 4 November 2019 / Accepted: 22 May 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
Using primary data gathered from a field survey in Sindhupalchowk, Nepal following the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015, this paper investigates the role that households’ expost coping responses play in their economic and psychosocial recovery after disasters. For empirical estimation, we use a full-information multi-equation system and allow for contemporaneous correlation across equations to account for the processes that influence households’ responses. We find that financial access and labor adjustment opportunities increase the likelihood of higher economic resilience. On the other hand, while the adoption of financial coping strategies contributes to higher psychosocial resilience, we find that labor adjustment choices may disrupt family and social dynamics, thereby decreasing psychosocial resilience. Based on these findings, we argue that top-down post-disaster policy approaches face challenges in identifying tradeoffs across different aspects of wellbeing. Our findings underscore the importance of mobilizing local institutions and expanding market and non-market alternatives for post-disaster recovery. Keywords Disasters . Nepal earthquake . Coping . Resilience . Recovery JEL Classification MSC: N/a . Q54 . Q56 . O17
Introduction The past few decades have witnessed unprecedented number of natural disasters, both in terms of frequency of occurrences and their impacts on human lives. Between 1994 and 2013, 6873
* Veeshan Rayamajhee [email protected] Alok K. Bohara [email protected] Virgil Henry Storr [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Economics of Disasters and Climate Change
natural disasters have been reported worldwide that impacted 218 million people on average per year and have cumulatively claimed 1.3 million lives. Along with the frequency of natural disasters, disaster-related death rates have also been rising steadily (CRED 2015). This paper centers around the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, one of the 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) that ranks among the most earthquake-prone countries in the world (Bilham et al. 2001). The devastating 7.8 magnitude quake on April 25, 2015 and dozens of aftershocks that followed, including one of 7.3 magnitude on 12th May, caused destruction of a scale comparable to that of the decade long Maoist insurgency –in terms of lives lost, population affected, and economic costs (Joshi 2014; CRED 2015). The event claimed over 9000 lives, affected another 8 million, and resulted in estimated direct and indirect economic losses amounting to 10 billion USD (ibid.). The Government of Nepal’s (GON) response was slow and ineffective, and often hindered multi-agency recovery and relief efforts through bureaucratic hurdles (Regmi 2016; Daly et al. 2017; Rayama
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