Predicting Long-Term Business Recovery from Disaster: A Comparison of the Loma Prieta Earthquake and Hurricane Andrew
Files
Date
1999
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Disaster Research Center
Abstract
Description
Although in recent years social scientists have paid increasing attention to the impacts of disasters on the private sector, little is currently known about how disasters affect the long-term economic viability of businesses. Most studies of disaster recovery have taken either households or entire communities as the unit of analysis (Bolin 1982; Bolin and Bolton 1986; Rubin 1981; Rubin, Saperstein, and Barbee 1985), and those that have looked at the economic impacts of disasters tend to focus on large levels of aggregation, such as regional economies, rather than on individual firms (Albala-Bertrand 1993; Cohen 1993; 1995; Friesema et al. 1979; Rossi et al.
1978; West and Lenze 1994). When researchers have studied how disasters affect individual
businesses and economic activity, they have generally focused on short-term impacts, rather than the longer-term consequences of disaster victimization (Alesch et al. 1993; Gordon et al. 1995). Thus, it is not currently known whether disasters have any discernible longer-term consequences for individual businesses.
Keywords
business recovery, Prieta earthquake, Hurricane Andrew