Research On Indirect Economic Lossestimation Due To Seismic Highway Transportation System Disruption

Highway Transportation System (HTS) plays crucial role in maintaining people life, social and economic development and emergency and recovery when earthquake happens. In recent years, rapid development of society and economy has caused high centralization of population and economy, which will call for more larger and complicated HTS to meet the needs, thus intensifying the disaster risk of HTS. Earthquake is inevitable. Its hit will trigger the potiential disaster risk and turns into a catastrophy, which could bring great economic losses that not only destroy the current achievements but also hamper the pace of social and economic development. Compared to the intuition of direct economic loss, indirect economic loss of HTS, as a key part of economic loss, is always been ignored by risk managers and decision makers. However, recently high-frequent earthquake disasters caused indirect economic losses is shocking, which make more scholars focus on the research of indirect economic losses caused by the seismic disruption of lifelines.Evaluation of indirect economic losses caused by seismic disruption of HTS is not only subject to operability of HTS’s engineering and application of economic losses evaluation, but also the current economic losses model under the specific natural disaster environment, so this would make the cross search of HTS and economic system more important. Indirect economic losses of seismic HTS disruption has become a key part for reducing earthquake caused economic losses, consolidating the achievements of social and economic development and alleviating resistance of development, which is quite meaningful practically and theoretically.Based on analyzing the researches from home and abroad, this paper takes the theory of disaster system, disaster risk and general equilibrium, uses the methods of quality and quantity analysis, general equilibrium analysis, scenario analysis and case study and starts with concepts analysis on disaster indirect economic loss to make deep researches into the key problems including the impacts of earthquake on the HTS, damaged HTS’s affecting mechanism on economic system, modeling indirec economic loss in the case of disaster, and the impact of resilience on indirect economic loss estimation and reasonable range of estimation results. The main contents and innovations of this paper are as below:Define the relevant concepts and scope of indirect economic losses of seismic HTS disruption. Based on literature review, this paper points out that “flow” should be a basis for differentiating direct and indirect economic losses in order to avoid double counting; analyzes the seismic impacts on HTS and economic system, and puts forwards the classification basis for direct and indirect economic losses from the point of influence process and way; indicates that indirect economic losses should be further divided into initial and induced economic losses according to the interdependency between industrial sectors of economic system; finally the theoretical theoretical analysis framework and conceptual system of this paper are constructured.Build indirect impact evaluation model of seismic HTS disruption and estimate initial indirect economic loss. By analyzing direct and indirect impacts on HTS caused by earthquake disasters, this paper points out that traffic volume is an important factor for reflecting redundency and estimating accessibility of HTS. With the index of accessibility, this paper modifies indirect impact evaluation model of seismic HTS disruption by introducing the factor of traffic volume. On this basis, the indirect impact of earthquake disaster on HTS is translated into initial inidrect economic loss expressed as output reduction of highway transportation sector.Build indirect economic loss estimation models in the case of earthquake disaster. Form the aspects of economic circular flow, this paper analyzes the impacts on the economy of disaster-affected region caused by earthquake damaged HTS. We assume that pre–disaster economic equilibrium is a benchmark scenario while a counterfactual scenario is defined as the broken equilibrium after an earthquake by output reduction of highway transportation sector. Then build dynamic Input-Output (I-O) model and Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of disaster-hit area by analyzing impact factors in disaster situation and limitations of estimation models. Based on I-O and CGE model, this paper estimates the indirect economic loss of seimic HTS disruption, respectively by simulating and comparing pre and post earthquake economic equilibrium of disaster-affected area.Apply the integrated framework of indirect economic loss estimation of seismic HTS disruption to a case study. This paper applys the integraed evaluation framework to estimate the indirect economic loss of Shifang’s damaged HTS caused by Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province. Then discuss the uncertainty of the results from dynamic I-O model and CGE model and resilience’s impact on study results. Finally put forward the reasonable range of indirect economic loss and applicability of dynamic I-O model and CGE model in disaster indirect economic loss estimation.