Abstract
In spite of a long history of coastal disasters worldwide and detailed studies of their short-term impacts, there is still little information about the longer-term economic and socioeconomic consequences of these events. The long-term impacts of natural disasters are “hidden” since distinguishing them from other post-disaster developments is difficult. A decade after an event, how many of the observed changes in an economy can confidently be attributed to the event itself? Because the long-term effects of coastal disasters have rarely been studied, they remain unaccounted for in any pre- and post-disaster planning and policy decisions. We focus on the 1960 tsunami and the 1992 Hurricane Iniki on Hawaii and Kauai islands, respectively. The other Hawaiian Islands, which were not hit by the tsunami or hurricane, provide an ideal control group that potentially enables us to distinguish between long-term impacts and other post-disaster developments. We describe the regional macroeconomy for the Hilo region in Hawaii and the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. We use Hurricane Iniki to demonstrate how to disentangle long-term consequences on Kauai and speculate what were the long-term impacts of 1960 Hilo tsunami.
JEL: Q54, R11
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Notes
- 1.
Source: State of Hawaii, Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism, http://hawaii.gov/dbedt (accessed 31/05/2012).
- 2.
“Hawaii” is used both as the name for the whole Hawaiian archipelago and US state and for one of its constituent islands/counties.
- 3.
Data are obtained from the University of Hawaii Economic Research dataset, www.uhero.hawaii.edu (accessed 31/05/2012).
- 4.
Unless stated otherwise, all dollar amounts are presented in terms of real 2012 dollars, adjusted using consumer inflation data.
- 5.
The majority of the information in this section is sourced from Hung (1961).
- 6.
The survey was conducted independently by Nobuo Maruyama and reported in Hung (1961).
- 7.
See State of Hawaii (1978), table #4.
- 8.
The other two hurricanes were Dot in 1959 and Iwa in 1982.
- 9.
All data is from EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, http://www.emdat.be/ (accessed 22/05/2011). EM-DAT cites 5 billion in 1992 US$. We converted these to 2012 US$ using CPI data.
- 10.
The counterfactual Kauai without the hurricane in the following figure is constructed as a weighted average of the other Hawaiian Islands. For details see Coffman and Noy (2012).
- 11.
For example, the most famous Kauai hotel at the time, the Coco Palms—a popular destination for the Hollywood set, never reopened; at the time of writing, the property is still shuttered and awaiting reconstruction a full 20 years after it was damaged.
- 12.
Named after the two largest towns in the area.
- 13.
A similar shift of the economic center of gravity in California, from San Francisco to Los Angles, is sometimes attributed to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that destroyed much of the city’s downtown (e.g., Winchester 2005).
- 14.
Clearly, the area around the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant may never recover completely, but in our context, we are interested in the long-term consequences of the tsunami further north in the Tohoku region (see Noy 2011).
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Project R/IR-22, which is sponsored by the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program, SOEST, under Institutional Grant No. NA09OAR4170060 from NOAA Office of Sea Grant, Department of Commerce. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA or any of its subagencies.
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Lynham, J., Noy, I. (2013). Disaster in Paradise: A Preliminary Investigation of the Socioeconomic Aftermaths of Two Coastal Disasters in Hawaii. In: Pfeifer, K., Pfeifer, N. (eds) Forces of Nature and Cultural Responses. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5000-5_6
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