Sri Lankan households a decade after the Indian Ocean tsunami

Diana De Alwis and Ilan Noy

No 19497, Working Paper Series from Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance

Abstract: We estimate the causal effect of the Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka on household income and consumption eight years after the event, using a quasi-experimental method. A strong association between area-wide tsunami disaster shock and increases in household income and consumption in the long-term emerged from our empirical investigation. Deviating from the common observation on short-term impacts, these results are suggestive of an optimistic potential for some long-lasting potentially successful recovery scenarios. Still, Sri Lanka received a very large amount of external transfers post-tsunami, much larger than is typical for disaster events and one which may not be replicable in other cases. Our findings suggest a more nuanced picture with respect to household consumption impacts. We observe a reduction of food consumption and only find an increase in non-food consumption. The increase in non-food consumption is much smaller than the observed increase in income. We also find that households in high-income regions experienced much better recovery from the disaster.

Keywords: Sri Lanka; Indian Ocean Tsunami; Household income; Household consumption; Disaster; Household survey; Long-run impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ir.wgtn.ac.nz/handle/123456789/19497

Related works:
Journal Article: Sri Lankan households a decade after the Indian Ocean tsunami (2019)
Working Paper: Sri Lankan Households a Decade after the Indian Ocean Tsunami (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vuw:vuwecf:19497

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance Alice Fong, Administrator, School of Economics and Finance, Victoria Business School, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600 Wellington, New Zealand. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library Technology Services ().