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Story of the hurricane: Government, NGOs, and the difference in disaster relief targeting

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102702Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Natural disasters aid can be channeled through governments or NGOs.

  • In the short-term, NGOs targeted communities most affected by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua.

  • The government did not significantly target hardest-hist areas.

  • Aid targeting was similar between NGOs and the government in the long term.

  • No evidence that aid from the government was manipulated for political gains.

Abstract

After catastrophes, international donors offering assistance must decide whether to channel resources via the local government or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We examine how these channels differ in targeting aid by combining survey data on aid received by Nicaraguan households before and after Hurricane Mitch. In the short term, NGOs provided aid according to hurricane severity, while government aid allocations were not significantly higher in the hardest hit areas. However, government-provided aid matched that of NGOs several years later. Despite the lag in government aid, we do not find evidence of political manipulation of relief aid in either the short or long-term.

Section snippets

Nicaragua and Hurricane Mitch

Hurricane Mitch made landfall as a Category 5 storm on October 26, 1998, just north of the border between Nicaragua and Honduras. The hurricane was notable for its slow movement across Central America, leading to widespread flooding and crop destruction from the unprecedented amount of precipitation in a four day period. The hurricane caused an estimated 11,000 total deaths (3,800 in Nicaragua), vastly more than those caused by other storms that have affected the region. The impact of the storm

Data on aid allocations and household characteristics

Information on the allocation of aid in Nicaragua comes from the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) conducted by Nicaragua’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC). The LSMS is a nationally representative household survey that collects extensive information on household economic activity, education, and demographics.6 Respondents are identified geographically at the municipality level, and

Empirical strategy

To see how aid allocations differ in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, we exploit the timing of the hurricane relative to the three waves of the LSMS survey. We model household h’s receipt of aid separately from each source – either government or NGO – in a given municipality m, separately for each period: four-to-zero years before the hurricane, the short term (zero-to-three years after the hurricane), and long term (three-to-seven years after). Our main specification estimates the following

Results

The estimated effects of the impact of Hurricane Mitch on the probability that a household receives aid are presented separately for each time period (before, short term, and long term) and each source of aid (government or NGOs). The estimates are presented in chronological order to display the evolution over time of the response by each aid source.

Table 2 (Panel A) presents estimates of the relationship between pre-hurricane aid allocations and the future impact of Hurricane Mitch. As aid

Conclusion

This paper generates insights on the efficacy of different aid channels in targeting affected populations the wake of a natural disaster. Using several waves of a household survey covering the period before, immediately after, and several years after Hurricane Mitch struck Nicaragua, we are able to study how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) differed from the domestic government in their provision of post-disaster aid relief. Using the pre-disaster survey round to account for the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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  • Cited by (2)

    1

    We are grateful to Alfredo Burlando, Trudy Cameron, Amy Damon, Tom Vogl, and Glen Waddell for helpful comments. This paper greatly benefited from discussion with seminar participants at the Sociedad de Economía de Chile Encuentro Anual, Liberal Arts Colleges Development Conference, Northwest Development Workshop, Oregon Resource and Environmental Economics Workshop, Skidmore College, and University of Oregon. This research has been supported in part by funding from the endowment of the Raymond F. Mikesell Chair in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Oregon .

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