Abstract

ROMERO PINO, BELKIS ENIDIAN. Long-term economic impact of hurricanes Ivan and Dean on Jamaica. rev. econ. Caribe [online]. 2022, n.29, pp.50-75.  Epub Sep 28, 2022. ISSN 2011-2106.  https://doi.org/10.14482/ecoca.29.041.423.

Jamaica has exhibited very slow economic growth over the last three decades, with disruptions in 2004 and 2007 when the island was impacted by hurricanes Ivan and Dean respectively. This research paper estimates the long-run effect of both hurricanes on Jamaica's GDP per capita using the synthetic control method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003). With this synthetic control, it was possible to replicate in both cases the islands economic growth trajectories for the periods prior to hurricanes Ivan and Dean, in other words, the trajectories of Jamaicas real GDP per capita overlapped with their synthetic counterfactuals. This allowed us to estimate a decline in average GDP per capita 737 and 1 403 USD for Hurricanes Ivan and Dean, respectively, in the ten years following the event. By converging both effects, we obtain an average total negative impact of USD 2,140 during the period 2007 -2017. This study contributes to the empirical evidence that natural disasters have negative and persistent effects on Jamaica>s economic growth, due to the fact that in the time interval analyzed it did not manage to recover the level of growth it had before the events.

Keywords : control; disasters; growth; natural; synthetic.

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