| China has always been a country filled with a lot of natural disasters, as one of the most serious victims of natural disasters, China nearly covered all types of natural disasters except volcanic eruptions, such as floods, droughts, earthquakes, geological disasters, forest and marine disasters etc. These disasters are always threatening people's lives and property, and severely restricting the production and living of our people and the socio-economic development. For example, according to statistics of relevant departments. China's average annual direct economic loss of natural disasters is more than 100 billion Yuan since the founding. And there is more than 40 million hectares of crops and 200 million people are affected. China is frequently attacked by floods, almost every year. It has caused 27 million people died,110 million houses collapsed and 9.13 million hectares of crops affected and 5.1 million hectares be disaster area, respectively account for 10% and 5% of cultivated area in China. In recent years of general level of the disaster, China's direct economic loss just from floods and droughts will account for about 3% of GDP; the proportion of economic loss over total fiscal revenue is often as high as 20-30%. In the past two years, from "Wenchuan Earthquake" to "Yushu Earthquake", "Southwest Drought", "Storm floods in southern China", and "Zhouqu debris flow disaster in Gansu", the recent series of natural disasters always affects hundreds of millions of people.Although the growing economic strength and technological level seems to make us become very strong in response to natural disasters and post-disaster reconstruction, the economic costs of natural disasters and their impact is also growing with the growth of population, economic activities, and property intensity. Whether it is within the scope of view from around the world, or of our country alone, the scale of the economic losses caused by natural disasters is being continuously expanded. On the other hand, in view of the enormous and far-reaching implications f natural disasters on economic and social development, our governments has always attached great importance to the issue of disaster prevention and mitigation, and always are sparing no effort to take various measures to improve the capacity of the whole society in disaster prevention and reduction. In 2007, the State Council issued "'Eleventh Five-Year' Plan of comprehensive mitigation", and took disaster prevention and mitigation as an important guarantee for archiving the overall objective of sustainable development of national economy and society. However, facing to enormous potential and powerful natural disaster risk, we certainly have a long way to go. It had already become a consensus to keep paying attention to the losses and effects arising from natural disasters, actively promote capacity building of disaster prevention and mitigation, and minimize the adverse impact of natural disasters.Natural disasters have both natural and social attributes. Compared to natural science research on natural disaster such as research on disaster mechanism and enginecring measures, it is also a major research topic to explore the relationship between national wealth and natural disaster from a broader perspective based on social science research. From a social point of view, economic losses are the most direct impact of disasters and focused performance. However, people often focus too much on material damage, while ignoring the impact of other types of loss. Human capital, natural capital and social capital is also an important component of national wealth. If we can measure the material loss more "accurately", the assessment on the loss of human capital, natural capital, and social capital would be more "vague" because of the shortage of adequate information and effective tools. But we insist that "direct economic losses" should only be view as a "floor level", because physical and material loss is neither the only, nor even the most important on earth. In addition, loss of natural disasters has always been an important basis for disaster management and disaster prevention and mitigation decisions. So we should extend the bound of loss assessment, use "fuzzy right" to replace "exact error" so that we can correctly measure the true loss and impact of natural disasters. Thereby, the paper tries to analyze the loss and impact of natural disaster based on the view which views disaster loss as loss of national wealth, that is, some in-depth analysis of the essence of the economic losses and impact from an overall macro perspective.The paper has three parts:the first is research on economic effects of natural disaster and loss of national wealth, which contains reviewing the foreign and domestic literature on disaster economics, summarizing economic losses of natural disaster and trend, and explaining the concept of national wealth loss of natural disasters; the second part is study about losses of human capital, natural capital and social capital. It means that we will analyze the losses of national wealth caused by natural disaster, the missing loss because of a narrow definition of disaster loss, and the consequence that it may bring with; the third part will introduce disaster management and the policy of prevention and mitigation. It contains assessment of management and policy that already exists, and we will give some specific thoughts and countermeasures which based on the philosophy of sustainable development.The general idea of the paper is:the economic losses of natural disasters are the most concentrated expression of the impact of disasters. And the losses don't only and even mainly mean the direct losses, but people should understand it and seek solutions according to the framework of national wealth management. We would not eliminate the negative impact of natural disasters on socio-economic development until adapting the perspective based on loss controlling of national wealth. The paper is organized as follows:The first chapter is an introduction, which introduces the research background, purpose and meaning, logical structure and methodology of research and innovation and the major shortcomings.Chapterâ…¡is the review of theory and research, which includes foreign and domestic development of disaster economics, and the inspiration and reference from the progress of foreign research. The summary of foreign research includes origin, the economic consequence of disasters, the relationship between natural disaster and economic development, and the research on coping strategy and mechanism. At the same time, the summary of domestic research contains the studies about economic losses and prevention and mitigation. In terms of inspiration and reference, we summarized through four aspects, i.e. interdisciplinary study, the domination of government, recognition into the complexity of disasters' impact, and the availability of basic data.Chapterâ…¢summarized the overall condition of China's natural disasters, and analyzed the trend of economic losses. According to statistical data. We believe that the economic losses of natural disasters in China since 1978, has the following trend:the death tolls Show a downward trend; size of the population affected by disasters is expanding; crop area affected and disaster rate are on the rise; maybe there is a "disaster cycle", and its length is 3.6 years; the absolute size of direct economic loss tends to expand, its share of GDP is about 3%; disaster relief spending is also growing. Finally, author used ARIMA model to predict China's losses from natural disasters in next three years.Chapter IV studied economic impacts of natural disasters. We thought the economic impacts respectively from two tangles-macroeconomic impact and microeconomic impact. When we studied the macroeconomic impact, we summarized the overall condition of global disasters, and conducted a panel model which included 14 members such as America, Japan, and China etc. Time span is 1970-2008. We have got some useful information about the relationship between natural disaster and economic development from the outcome of the model. At last, we studied the socio-economic factors to the impact of natural disaster in China, which based on the concept of social vulnerability.Chapter V proposed the concept of national wealth losses caused by natural disaster. It is the major theoretical viewpoints and the basis of our whole research. In this part, we firstly rethought the concept of national wealth and how to weigh it. Then we reviewed the problems of national accounts. Based on the World Bank's theories and ways on the accounting of national wealth, we proposed the measures to account national wealth losses caused by natural disasters, including physical capital losses, human capital losses, and natural capital losses. Finally, we figured out the national wealth losses in China from 1998. We found that China would lose about 550 billion Yuan because of every year's natural disasters. Among them, physical capital loss accounted for 54% of the whole losses; the share of human capital loss was 29%; and 17% for natural capital loss. The Wenchuan earthquake of 2008 Led to about 2.775 trillion Yuan loss of national wealth. 2.36 times of the direct economic loss.Chapter VI interpreted the situation of natural disaster management and the policy of prevention and mitigation in China. We reviewed the thoughts and measures of "Famine Politics" in ancient China with the conditions of centralized feudal system. We also analyzed the situation of disaster management from foundation, and pointed out the defects and deficiencies of the prevention and mitigation system. They are mainly manifested in four major aspects:the first is the defects of management system, such as decentralized management, overlapping functions and absence:the second is lack of prevention, reflected in the backward infrastructure, monitoring and early warning systems, and faint awareness of prevention and disaster reduction; the third is the slow response, demonstrated by imperfect department interaction, rescue team building and the organization of social forces; the last aspects lied in loss assessment of natural disasters. i.e. a narrow range of loss, the shortage of statistical indicators and the missing of impact assessment. This is essentially a short-sighted behavior; it is not only one of the causes led to the aforementioned problems, but also may trigger directional bias of the prevention and mitigation policies.Chapter VII proposed our count measures for controlling losses of national wealth. This kind of policies would take national wealth loss controlling as a fundamental objective to natural disaster management and policy making in prevention and mitigation. That is to say, people must adapt various instruments such as administrable, economic, legal and cultural tools, Mobilize and organize all aspects of society's resources and forces to prevent and mitigate disaster loss, including human capital, physical capital, natural capital and social capital, by various engineering and non-structural mitigation measures. The overall features of the policy mainly lie in four aspects:oneness, syntheses, regionality, and scientificalness. Specifically:first, straighten out the authority and responsibility of natural disaster management as soon as possible; second, continue to increase defense capabilities and prevention to natural disasters; third, strengthen the emergency response capacity to natural disasters:fourth, plan and implement disaster recovery and reconstruction scientifically; fifth, conduct loss assessment of national wealth in natural disasters; sixth, mobilize deeply and organize effectively all sectors of society.Chapterâ…§is the conclusion of the paper, which summarized and concluded the full-text and main points of us.By making a comprehensive view, the main innovation could come down to three aspects:First, we set up the analysis and research goal based on loss controlling of national wealth. This practice could make us to gather all specific goals into one, and evaluate the economic losses and impacts of natural disasters better because of the redefinition for disaster losses.Second, we conducted a comprehensive study through the angle of more discipline, such as disaster economics, emergency management, and environment economics and management. We attempted to colligate various ways from different discipline, so we avoided some limitations derived single visual angle and thought to some extent.Third, we implemented an integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting Thought in a pragmatic and progressive way. Our study may be view as a preliminary small-scale attempt in terms of natural capital loss accounting. It partly reflected the relationship between environment and economics. On this point we happened to be consistent with the intension of UN. et al. which mentioned by them in "SEEA 2003" They also want to bring disasters into accounting in the future.The inadequacies of this study can be attributed to two points:one is subjective. As we all know, the impacts of natural disasters lie in many aspects, even the economic impacts could also be very wide and dynamic. We still often find it difficult to reveal the intelligible essence of the problem when we came down to the losses and impacts that were difficult to account for; the other is objective. The collection of related information and data is fairly difficult, and we didn't have enough time relatively. For example, statistical standards of natural disasters in different periods are often different, and more details are often difficult to obtain either. Especially when we encountered the part difficult to account, although the information about it is very important, but we can not get it at last. The lack of related information and data could result in significantly different or even opposite conclusions. |
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