The economic impact of natural disasters is often short-lived. Will this be the case in Japan?
THE full extent of the damage from the tsunami that hit Japan’s north-eastern coast on March 11th is not yet known, but early estimates of the cost are big. Rebuilding homes, factories, roads and bridges could cost as much as $200 billion, some reckon. Quite apart from these direct costs, is the disaster likely to do lasting harm to Japan’s economy?
Much will depend on the success of efforts to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Assuming the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant stabilises, the contours of the economic impact of the tsunami itself can already be discerned. Natural disasters disrupt production, much as less destructive episodes of bad weather do.
In Japan the interruption to electricity supply means that output has been affected even in areas the tsunami did not directly inundate. Toyota, for example, halted production because of problems with parts and supplies. Operations were suspended in six of Sony’s factories, only one of which was flooded.
But such disruption is unlikely to persist. On March 16th Toyota announced that it was restarting the production of spare parts. As with bad weather, disasters cause some output to be postponed rather than lost. When production resumes, it is likely to be at a faster clip than usual. Studies of the economic effects of past natural disasters, as well as Japan’s own experience after the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, provide further reassurance. They suggest that the macroeconomic effects of the tsunami, though hardly negligible, will not be devastating and will not last very long.
How much a natural disaster reduces output over the medium term depends on a number of factors. Location matters: disasters that strike an industrial belt will be more economically crippling than ones that hit an area where little is produced; the economic effects of the tsunami would have been much worse if it had struck Japan’s industrial heartland. And different kinds of natural disasters have different consequences for growth. In the medium term, not all effects are negative. A 2009 World Bank study found that by increasing soil fertility, a typical flood increases agricultural output in the year after it strikes (though output falls in the year it occurs). The benefits from higher agricultural production spill over to other sectors, and in developing countries where the farm sector is a bigger part of the economy this may be enough to lead to faster growth in manufacturing and services in subsequent years.
Earthquakes, on the other hand, have small but consistently negative effects on economic growth. This is because earthquakes do not just shut production down for a while. They also destroy factories, roads, electricity lines and offices. This destruction does not directly reduce a country’s GDP, which measures the value of the flow of goods and services that an economy produces. But it does affect an economy’s underlying productive capacity. The Japanese tsunami fits this template.
As long as these assets remain out of commission, the output they would have produced is, in theory, lost. In practice, this negative effect can partly be made up by using plant and machinery in areas unaffected by the disaster. Most factories do not run at full steam all the time; output from plants that are still working can be increased to make up for lost production elsewhere.
An analysis of the effect of the Kobe earthquake by George Horwich of Purdue University provides some reason to hope that this might happen in Japan. The quake ravaged many of the facilities of what was then the world’s sixth-largest container port and the source of nearly 40% of Kobe’s industrial output. Over 100,000 buildings were completely destroyed, and many more badly damaged; 300,000 people were rendered homeless; over 6,000 died. Yet despite this devastation in a big production centre, the local economy recovered very fast. Even though less than half the port facilities had been rebuilt by that stage, within a year import volumes through the port had recovered fully and export volumes were nearly back to where they would have been without the disaster. Less than 15 months after the earthquake, in March 1996, manufacturing activity in greater Kobe was at 98% of its projected pre-quake level.
Mr Horwich reckons that the likely reason for this rebound in output and economic activity, even as swathes of infrastructure still lay in ruins, is that output can be produced using different combinations of labour and capital. Although a disaster may destroy physical capital, things can be made using more labour or using it more intensively than before. In addition, rebuilding is easier than building up capital the first time around, because it mainly aims to replicate a pattern of investment rather than figure out what to invest in. And productivity growth may accelerate when new, and often superior, machinery is installed.
A glimmer, at least
Reconstruction itself, of course, also helps to offset the negative impact of a drop in output in the aftermath of a disaster. Business booms for builders and producers of capital goods. Disasters probably do not actually stimulate the economy because additional production in some sectors may be displacing spending elsewhere, though this is less of a worry in an economy with a lot of spare capacity. Certainly, the year of the Kobe quake was not a bad one for the Japanese economy, which grew by 1.9% in 1995 compared with 0.9% growth in 1994.
There are grounds to hope, then, that this month’s terrible events will not cause lasting damage to Japan’s economy. But there are worries, too. The nuclear crisis adds greatly to uncertainty. Consumer and business confidence is fragile. With interest rates already at zero, policymakers have little wiggle room. Japan’s manufacturing sector is running closer to full capacity now than in the mid-1990s, making it harder to make up for lost output. When disasters occur can matter as much to the economy as how bad they are. The Economist
East Asia's view of Japan
ReplyDeleteUNSURPRISINGLY, the main topic of debate yesterday at the World Bank’s inaugural “Conference on East Asian Development” in Singapore was the ongoing crisis in Japan. Hundreds of delegates from throughout the region (which includes, for the Bank’s purposes, China and Mongolia as well as all the usual suspects) started the day with a minute’s silence: a moving tribute to Japan’s dead from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 11th.
Altogether, it was an impressive display of pan-Asian sympathy and support. For her part, the main Japanese delegate to the conference, Naoko Ishii, the deputy vice-minister of finance for international affairs, reassured everyone several times that Japan was not about to turn inwards after this disaster, as some people have feared. Far from it, she said, the country is keen to carry on shouldering its regional and international responsibilities as before.
And Ms Ishii also had a clear message for The Economist. Halfway through her presentation she unfurled a copy of this week’s issue and waved it around in front of the audience. Pointing to the cover, she said “We are not falling out, we are not melting down”…winning a general murmur of approval from the floor. Neat soundbite, I thought.
Her point, which she made to me at greater length during the course of an amicable conversation afterwards, was that she thought some parts of the Western press—not just this newspaper—were exaggerating the ill effects of the crisis on Japan. Our actual coverage of the crisis, as presented inside the week’s issue, is very reasonable, she conceded. But such images and headlines as the cover’s are “alarmist” and overly negative. In fact Japan is more resilient than people gave the country credit for and will rebuild itself relatively quickly. Certainly most of the assembled economists, politicians and policy wonks at the conference were keen to believe her.
As to the number-crunching substance of the conference, the World Bank delivered its first and very preliminary assessment of the earthquake, as measured against Japan’s and the region’s economic prospects. The country’s “real GDP growth will slow, but the slowdown is likely to be temporary…growth should start picking up after mid-2011 as reconstruction efforts get under way. Japan’s past experience suggests an accelerated reconstruction effort, and the short-term impact on the economies of developing East Asia is likely to be limited.”
The Bank also made an interesting comparison with the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Then, “Japan’s trade slowed only for a few quarters; Japanese imports recovered fully within a year and exports rebounded to 85% of pre-quake levels. But this time around, disruption to production networks, especially in automotive and electronics industries, could continue to pose problems.”
One reason for the region’s sudden solidarity with Japan must be the thought that “there but for the grace of God.” It was pointed out that East Asia accounts for 76% of the world’s natural disasters and 82% of the fatalities they claim. It is also home to four of the world’s ten most vulnerable cities. The Indonesians, Filipinos, Chinese and others gathered in the Singapore hotel ballroom needed little reminding of these brutal facts. Reason enough to pull together. The Economist