Do disasters affect policy priorities? Evidence from the 2010 Chilean Earthquake

ABSTRACT

Disasters can destroy and damage private property like houses and public property like roads, schools, and hospitals. Do people prioritize the distribution of both private and public goods after being exposed to these negative events? How long do these priorities last after disasters? Using ten surveys spanning four years — half conducted before and half after the 2010 Chilean earthquake — and a difference-in-differences design, I find that exposure to this disaster makes people care more only about housing but not about crucial public goods also affected by the earthquake such as infrastructure and transportation. Additionally, these effects on policy priorities vanished after two years. These findings further our understanding of citizens’ policy priorities after shocks that severely deteriorate people’s living conditions, such as disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Private goods
• public goods
• policy priorities
• disasters

Acknowledgements

I thank Kathleen Griesbach, Shigeo Hirano, Owura Kuffuor, Greg Love, Luis Maldonado, Isabela Mares, John Marshall, Jay McCann, M. Victoria Murillo, Kayla Young, and José Zubizarreta for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Ricardo González, Bernardo Mackenna, and the Centro de Estudios Públicos for sharing the survey data. This project was supported by FONDECYT grant number 1191522 (Economía Moral de los Desastres Socionaturales y el Estado). All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Private goods refer to resources that are both excludable and rivalrous: recipients can exercise property rights on them, and receiving them affects their availability to someone else. Public goods refer to resources that are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous: that is, an individual cannot be excluded from using them and being used by one individual does not reduce their availability to others (Samuelson 1954).

2 United States Geological Surveys, "20 Largest Earthquakes in the World."

3 Live Science, "Chile Quake & Tsunami Dramatically Altered Ecosystems."

4 The original infographic also expanded on other infrastructure damage.

5 The reconstruction plan explicitly mentions public transportation as a crucial problem to be addressed. The destruction of routes, highways, and bus stations substantially deteriorated the provision of this public service (Government of Chile 2010a).

6 The same question was asked three times, prompting respondents to identify three problems.

7 The existence of spillovers could be a concern, where internal migration from exposed to unexposed counties could affect the results. However, the reconstruction plan attempted to avoid this situation. Its main goal was to "maintain neighborhood social networks, consolidate existing settlements, and avoid migration from rural areas" (Government of Chile 2010b). Another concern is that exposure to disasters is a compound treatment since being affected by an earthquake can mean different things to victims. Nevertheless, this is a common issue when using natural experiments to learn about the effects of negative events that cannot be randomized.

8 Exposed participants come from 68 different counties and control participants from 76.

9 I provide more details about the covariates in appendix D.

10 A third explanation could rely on the role of social dilemma principles. In particular, on how people can change their focus from collective to individual goals (Chang, 2010).