International Redistribution and Natural Disasters
Description
Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, especially in less developed countries that often lack the resources needed to recover from the economic hardship caused by extreme weather events. To alleviate this problem, many industrialized democracies provide financial support in the form of international disaster assistance. Yet, the provision of international disaster relief can become politically contentious because it reduces the amount of resources available for domestic assistance programs and requires making conflictual “divide-the-dollar” decisions that determine how scarce financial resources should be distributed between affected recipient countries. This project explores the structure of preferences over global disaster relief with a focus on the role of fairness concerns and political interests. We will evaluate theoretical predictions by devising novel surveys and experimental designs that we will field to representative samples of the adult populations in the United Kingdom and the United States, two of the most important donor countries.
Data availability
The data and code will be made publicly accessible as part of a comprehensive replication archive (posted at the Harvard Dataverse or the journal’s data repository)
Team
Michael M. Bechtel – University of Cologne
Prof. Jeffrey Ziegler, Trinity College Dublin
Funding
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2126/1-390838866.