Natural Disasters, Household Welfare, and Resilience: Evidence from Rural Vietnam

The study uses commune fixed-effects regressions to estimate the effect of natural disasters on welfare and poverty of rural households in Vietnam, and subsequently examines household and community characteristics that can strengthen resilience of households to natural disasters. We find that all the three disaster types considered in this study including storms, floods, and droughts have negative effects on household income and expenditure. Households in communes with higher mean expenditure and more equal expenditure distribution are more resilient to natural disasters. Access to micro-credit, internal remittances, and social allowances can help households strengthen the resilience to natural disasters. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.