Dynamic Economic Resilience and Economic Recovery from Disasters: A Quantitative Assessment

This article analyzes the role of dynamic economic resilience in relation to recovery from disasters in general and illustrates its potential to reduce disaster losses in a case study of the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. We first offer operational definitions of the concept linked to policies to promote increased levels and speed of investment in repair and reconstruction to implement this resilience. We then develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model that incorporates major features of investment and traces the time-path of the economy as it recovers with and without dynamic economic resilience. The results indicate that resilience strategies could have significantly reduced GDP losses from the Wenchuan earthquake by 47.4% during 2008-2011 by accelerating the pace of recovery and could have further reduced losses slightly by shortening the recovery by one year. The results can be generalized to conclude that shortening the recovery period is not nearly as effective as increasing reconstruction investment levels and steepening the time-path of recovery. This is an important distinction that should be made in the typically vague and singular reference to increasing the speed of recovery in many definitions of dynamic resilience.