Natural Disasters and Economic Growth: a Synthesis of Empirical Evidence

Natural disasters pose a serious threat globally and, in the future, their frequency and severity are expected to increase due to climate change. Empirical evidence has reported conflicting results in terms of the impact of disasters on economic growth. In this context, the aim of this paper is to synthesize the recent empirical evidence in this topic. For this, meta-analysis and meta-regression techniques are employed. More than 650 estimates, from studies published in the last five years (2015-2020), are used. The review includes three sources (Scopus, Science Direct, and Google Scholar). The results identified the existence of a negative and significant combined effect (-0.015). Developing countries are especially vulnerable to disasters. The negative impact is greater for disasters that occurred in the last decade -in relation to previous disasters-. These findings constitute a call for attention in favour of mitigation and adaptation policies.