ProQuest Sources

What was the economical impact of the earthquake on Haiti?
This is the essay question that we have to find a source that could answer this question and help us write an essay about the question. I used an artcle from ProQuest called: "Estimating the Direct Economic Damages of the Earthquake in Haiti: The Journal of the Royal Economic Society" by: Eduardo Cavallo, Andrew Powell and Oscar Becarra. I got to this article by searching (Haiti Earthquake) AND (economic impact). This article uses both historical data and science to make their estimates on how much it would cost to rebuild Haiti. It also talks a lot about the economical effects on Haiti and makes an initial estimation of to economical damages from the earthquake using Haiti's economic and demographic data. It states that the base etimate is 8.1 billion US dollars but this may be on the lower side and could be as much as 13.9 billion US dollars. If there was 200,000 then the estimate on the damages would be 7.2 billion US dollars but if there were 250,000 dead and missing people then the estimate would be 8.1 billion US dollars. Becasue most estimates say that the amount of dead and missing people is closer to 250,000 that means the estimate is 8.1 billion US dollars or more. To estimate the economical damages in Haiti, they had to combine the world's data from about 2,000 natural catastrophes that all happened between 1970 and 2008. But there have been few catastropes this big so that is also taken into consideration when making estimates. They use the damage of each event as a function of the number of missing and dead people, size of the country, the real GDP per capita and linear trends to model the dollar amount of damage.

I chose the article because I thought that is clearly addressed the essay question given. Not only did it talk about econimcal effects but it went on to talk about what it would take, economically to re-build Haiti. It also used a different kind of approach by using both history and science to make estimates and I thought that was kind of interesting.