The Policy Effect Assessment Of Post-Wenchuan Earthquake Recovery And Reconstruction

Natural disasters have always been one of the tremendous damages for human society.The occurrence of disasters has a huge impact on the economy of the affected countries and poses a great challenge to the sustainable development of human society.However,the relationship between natural disasters and economic growth has been controversial in academia.Some scholars believe that economy can grow more rapidly after a disaster,while some scholars believe that disasters have a negative impact on the economy or there is no necessary connection between the two.In real life,some regions drop into poverty due to disasters,while some and regions achieve faster economic growth after natural disasters.Based on the analysis of theory and reality,this paper argues that post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy plays a vital role in it.Therefore,the assessment of post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policies and the exploration of its specific action mechanism will have important implications for the formulation and implementation of future policies.However,policy assessment needs to be implemented in specific disaster events.In this context,the paper chooses the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake as the typical case,and uses Difference-in-Differences Approach(DID)to study the effect of post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy on the economic development of disaster-impacted area and its action mechanism,with 39 severely affected areas and the remaining 39 counties in Sichuan Province as the treatment group and the control group.Then,Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient are applied to examine the impact of post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policies on the economic development differences of disaster-impacted area.The research finds that the Wenchuan earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy has a significant positive effect on the real GDP and GDP growth rate per capita of disaster-impacted area.Compared with the control group,the real GDP will increase by 5.13% because of the implementation of the post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy.At the same time,through the exploration of the mechanism of post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy,it is found that increasing the investment in fixed assets,increasing the proportion of employed population and urban population,and increasing fiscal expenditure can have a significant positive impact on real GDP and GDP growth rate per capita.Among them,increasing the level of urbanization has the most obvious positive impact on the improvement of real GDP level,and the impact coefficient is 0.398;increasing the proportion of employed population to the total population has the greatest effect on increasing GDP growth rate per capita,with an impact coefficient of 0.123,which will be useful for future post-earthquake reconstruction work.In addition,this paper also finds that the treatment group affected by the post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy has a higher growth rate in industrial structure,total retail sales of social consumer goods,and fiscal revenue than the control group,which indicates that all aspects of the economic development of disaster-impacted area have achieved accelerated recovery and development.At the same time,through Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient,the post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction policy not only promotes the recovery and development of disaster-impacted economy,but also narrows the regional economic differences and achieves balanced development.Furthermore,the paper divides 39 severe disasters into 18 recipient areas and 21 non-recipient areas as the treatment group and the control group respectively,using the idea of DID approach to evaluate the effect of counterpart assistance and using a ternary plot to examine economic recovery of the 18 recipient areas.The results show that the 18 recipient areas achieve significantly higher growth rate in major economic indicators such as real GDP,real GDP per capita,and total retail sales of social retailers than that of non-recipient areas,which illustrates the positive promotion effect of counterpart assistance policy.However,in the course of the research,the paper finds that donor parties' economic strength and recipient parties' disaster-impacted degree have a certain degree of mismatch,while some donor parties' investment output efficiency is not high.Subsequent policy development and implementation processes can pay more attention to these issues.Finally,according to research findings,the paper proposes some relevant policy recommendations.