Chinese research on disaster economics: situation and characteristics

Abstract

This study employs the bibliometric method to analyse a sample of 936 core journal articles obtained from Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) during the period 1998–2014, with a view to outlining the situation, characteristics and trends of Chinese research on disaster economics. Our analysis shows that Chinese research on disaster economics is characterised by marked short-term fluctuations, non-mainstream tendency, localisation and non-collaboration. In terms of content, the major concerns of Chinese scholars are post-disaster construction, agricultural natural disasters, as well as disaster insurance and securitisation. In terms of methodology, these researches have entered into a quantitative phase of establishing the evaluation index system, and mathematical model analysis. With regard to the path, researches in the Chinese language have expanded from analyses of causes and natures of disasters to those of institutional response to disasters (e.g. disaster insurance and finance).

Keywords:

• Disaster economics
• bibliometric analysis
• mapping knowledge domain
• CiteSpace

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Notes

1 Statistics on the frequency of natural disasters that occurred in China during 1998–2014, including floods, droughts, earthquakes, pests, landslides, forest fires, and extreme temperature events, are drawn from International Disaster Database, which is set up by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology Disaster,

2 Calculated on the basis of the China Statistical Yearbook published by the National Bureau of Statistics, China Civil Affairs’ Statistical Yearbooks (1998–2014) published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the statistics released by the National Commission for Disaster Reduction on the basic situation of natural disasters in China.

3 CiteSpace is used particularly for the data mining of wide-ranging literature in a particular field of science. It is an analytical method of conducting a multidimensional analysis of massive literature, allowing visualising and mapping knowledge domain to be constructed. Mapping knowledge domain refers to the visualisation of knowledge in a particular area of science through mining, analysing and charting. Aiming to display the results of data mining in this study, we have omitted the data processing and mapping knowledge domain here. Readers can contact the authors for materials.