While the short-term economic impacts of extreme weather events are well documented, little is known about their impacts and transmission channels on economic growth in the long run. Using panel data regressions and national shares of people exposed to tropical cyclones and fluvial floods as exogenous predictors, we find output growth losses from severe tropical cyclones and fluvial floods to accumulate to −6.5% and −5.0% over 15 years, respectively. We further observe a strongly non-linear increase of these losses with disaster intensity. To understand how the observed impacts depend on the countries’ development level, we implement a country-specific regression framework. While we find evidence that higher development can prevent economic growth losses from fluvial floods, this is not the case for tropical cyclones. Further, we systematically study the economic and non-economic transmission channels through which these events impact on economic growth in the long run. We find that rising household consumption and government expenditure are the main growth-loss mitigating channels, whereas rising investment is the main growth-loss amplifying channel in the period 1971–2010.

尽管极端天气事件的短期经济影响已得到充分记录，但从长远来看，对极端天气事件的影响和传播渠道知之甚少。使用面板数据回归和暴露于热带气旋和河流洪水的人口的国家份额作为外生预测因子，我们发现严重热带气旋和河流洪水的产出增长损失在15年内分别累积至-6.5％和-5.0％。我们进一步观察到，这些损失随着灾害强度的增加而呈强烈非线性增长。为了了解观察到的影响如何取决于国家的发展水平，我们实施了针对特定国家的回归框架。尽管我们发现有证据表明较高的发展可以防止因河流洪水造成的经济增长损失，但热带气旋并非如此。更多，我们系统地研究了经济和非经济传播渠道，从长远来看，这些事件通过这些渠道影响经济增长。我们发现，家庭消费和政府支出的增长是缓解增长损失的主要途径，而投资增长是1971-2010年期间增长损失的主要途径。