Ethnic diversity and natural disaster mortality: evidence from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami

ABSTRACT

This study uses community-level mortality data on the 2011 Tohoku tsunami to explore the relationship between ethnic diversity and disaster mortality. The results show that ethnic fragmentation has little impact on tsunami mortality. An examination of fatalities categorized by 10-year age group, however, demonstrates that fragmentation is negatively correlated with mortality in extremely vulnerable populations, specifically those aged 9 years old or under and 80 years old or over. This result suggests that development of community-based evacuation measures may protect extremely vulnerable age groups in ethnically diversified communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic diversity
• fragmentation
• mortality
• the 2011 Tohoku tsunami

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H70
• J15
• Q54

Acknowledgments

I greatly appreciate Momi Dahan, Yohei Kobayashi, Hiroki Tanaka, and the participants in the seminars at Doshisha University and Kyushu University, the 70th Congress of the JIPF, and the 74th Congress of the IIPF for their helpful and insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. I also thank Jennifer Barrett, PhD, from Edanz Group for editing a draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Theoretically, when the benefit from public good consumption decreases with greater diversity in population type, more ethnically diverse societies favour a smaller amount of the public good (e.g. Alesina and La Ferrara 2005; Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly 1999).

² Mixed-race Japanese are defined as Japanese if they hold Japanese nationality.

³ See Table ESM A1 and Table ESM B1 in Miyazaki (2021), respectively, for variable definitions, units, and sources, and descriptive statistics.

⁴ See Table ESM C1 in Miyazaki (2021) for the full table where all estimated coefficients are reported.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (Grant Number: 16K13370).