ABSTRACT
The damages and losses from unscheduled events, such as earthquakes, floods, or other major natural disasters, have significant impacts on a region’s economy. Demand for instantaneous damage estimates, in addition to estimates of the economic impacts of longer-term recovery and reconstruction, arise almost immediately after such events. Most analytical models of urban and regional economies, however, cannot handle these unscheduled and significant changes, since, at best, they assume incremental changes in systems over time, and the models usually are created under the assumptions of equilibrium prevailing in markets (in other words, that excess demands will be zero). The consequences associated with disaster events are multifaceted and include damages on both the demand and supply sides. The difficulties with impact analysis of unscheduled events include: 1) disentangling the consequences stemming directly and indirectly from the event; 2) deriving possibly different assessments at each spatial level—cities, region, and nation (Hewings and Mahidhara 1996); and 3) evaluating the reaction of households, which is poorly understood at this time (West and Lenze 1994).
