Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Prof. Sanders: My
name is Mark Sanders.
I'm a Professor of
International Economics
at Maastricht University, and
together with my PhD student
Vincent Schippers at
Utrecht University,
we've done a research project
where the objective
was to measure
the economic impacts of
natural hazards at
the local level.
0:19
And in that literature,
when we came to that field,
what we found was a lot of
studies that were studying
this phenomenon of
natural hazards using
national level data
and data on catastrophes from
catastrophe databases
like EM-DAT and NatCat.
The problem with that
literature at that time,
the damage records
from reinsurers
and being collected
from news and agencies,
the usefulness of that data is
limited because it has
the problem that it has
better coverage in
high-income countries.
It has a lot of small
events and it's
collected often at the
wrong spatial scale.
But a more important
problem is that
these damages are
obviously correlated with,
for example, the level of income
in a region before it is hit.
The damages from
natural hazards are
not exogenous and so
it's really important
if you want to study the
impact of natural events on
the economy that we have local
data so at a local scale,
because these events
are typically
local events and that we have
the information on the intensity
of these natural events.
This is kind of the
starting point of
our research project
and therefore,
Vincent, what have
we done to try
and tackle these problems?
