Two Reform Stories, Two Floods
It's the rainy season in many parts of Asia, and over the past month India's Uttarakhand state and China's Sichuan province have been especially hard hit by floods. The contrast between the two holds a development lesson.
The Uttarakhand government announced Tuesday that 5,700 missing are now presumed dead, bringing the death toll from the flash flooding in mid-June to more than 6,000. Around the city of Dujiangyan in Sichuan, some 300 are currently listed as dead and missing.
From those figures you might think that India got the worst of mother Nature's fury, yet the rain in China was considerably more severe—between 800 and 1,150 millimeters in the worst-affected areas, according to the Sichuan Provincial Meteorological Administration. India's National Institute of Disaster Management reported 300 millimeters in the Devprayag area where most deaths occurred.
A caveat: Comparisons of floods are always inexact, not least because of differing topography. Melt water from the Himalayas also added to the disaster in India, and many pilgrims were visiting the area.
Nevertheless, the difference in the number of fatalities is striking. It roughly parallels the development levels of the two regions, with Sichuan residents earning more than $4,000 per year on average, compared to $1,400 in Uttarkhand.
That is no coincidence. A 2005 paper by UCLA economist Matthew E. Kahn showed a strong correlation between poverty and deaths from natural disasters. For instance, a 10% increase in per capita GDP decreases a nation's earthquake deaths by 5.3%. In 2010, earthquakes in the Americas proved this accurate: A magnitude 7.0 quake killed 220,000 in impoverished Haiti, while a much stronger 8.8 quake in Chile a month later only killed 500.
More controversially, Mr. Kahn found that democracy was barely statistically significant as a predictor of deaths from natural disasters. The governmental measures that mattered most were rule of law, control of corruption, voice and accountability, regulatory quality and protection against expropriation. These factors also correlated with deaths from industrial disasters, while income levels were less important.
Other researchers have found that democracy does make a difference. But there is little disagreement that economic development and more responsive government institutions save lives. In India's flooding last month, poor supervision of construction work for a hydroelectric dam is blamed for many of the deaths.
China is still in the middle ranks of development, and the hundreds of children who died in shoddily constructed schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake are a reminder that it has plenty of room for improvement. Nevertheless, the story of these two floods suggest Delhi's leaders should feel greater shame. China began its economic reforms 12 years earlier than India and moved faster to deregulate its economy. The survivors in Sichuan are proof that it has paid off.
