Welfare and natural disasters in Indonesia: accentuate or attenuate? Ari Purwanto Sarwo Prasojo*, Gusti Ayu Ketut Surtiari, Puguh Prasetyoputra
Research Center for Population, Indonesian Institute of Sciences
Abstract
The new paradigm of disaster management in Indonesia highlights reducing risk than focusing on response. However, the rising number of disasters in Indonesia exerts significant economic loss and number of victims. Previous studies tend to focus on the vulnerability assessment by proposing economic growth as one of the instruments to reduce risk. Based on evidence of disasters in Indonesia, we argue that understanding the contribution of economic growth to risk reduction is important. The question is whether catastrophe in Indonesia only occurs in the low economic growth or also severely affect middle to high economic growth areas. We implement the concept of welfare and risk reduction as an approach to analyse disaster and welfare data with a focus on flood events in 2014-2018. We obtained the data from BNPB and Statistics Indonesia. We fitted a multivariable negative binomial regression with person losses as the outcome and provincial Human Development Index (HDI) and provincial gross domestic product (GDP). The results suggest that Provincial HDI is negatively associated with person losses (P < 0.05). However, Provincial GDP was also found to be positively associated, albeit less strongly, with person losses (P < 0.10). These associations bring about potentially significant policy implications.
Keywords: natural disasters, welfare, economic loss, negative binomial regression, Indonesia
