The Effectiveness of Pre-Disaster Planning and Post-Disaster Aid: Examining the impact on plants of the Great East Japan Earthquake

We examine the extent to which pre-disaster planning and post-disaster aid can help firms to recover from a natural disaster event. Using detailed plant-level data covering the areas affected by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, we find that neither pre-disaster planning nor post-disaster aid has a significant effect on the short term impact of the disaster in terms of the number of days that plants ceased operations.

However, we do find evidence to suggest that post-disaster sales growth can be influenced by pre- and post-disaster policy. More specifically, we find that pre-disaster policies such as planning production substitution with other plants and making alternative transport arrangements affect sales post-disaster. We also discover that post-disaster aid from banks and from trading partners influences post-disaster sales but that government aid has no statistically significant effect.