Evaluation and Analysis of Indirect Industrial Economic Losses Caused by the Wenchuan Earthquake

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-734-2_73How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Disaster prevention and mitigation; Resilience; Indirect economic losses; Recovery time

Abstract

The rapid development of socio-economics has increased the complexity of factors influencing indirect earthquake losses and prolonged the impact duration, presenting significant challenges for assessing these losses. This study focuses on the 8.0 magnitude Wenchuan Earthquake that occurred on May 12, 2008, to investigate industrial indirect economic losses, comprehensively analyzing the effect of the earthquake on the gross production value (GPV) of various industrial sectors in Sichuan Province, and estimating sector-specific indirect losses based on the GDP approach. It was found that the industry-specific indirect economic loss for Sichuan’s total industrial output to recover to pre-earthquake levels amounted to RMB 1223.734 billion, approximately 13 times the direct economic losses. This figure is also higher than the estimates obtained from other methods cited in the literature. Five years after the earthquake, the indirect economic loss reached RMB 2772.229 billion, more than double the aforementioned figure, reflecting the characteristics of sector-specific indirect losses and their sustained impacts, while discussing the relationship between recovery time and industrial resilience. The analysis lays the groundwork for developing predictive evaluation methods for indirect economic losses in industrial sectors, contributing to sustainable development planning for industries and regions before an earthquake, and providing technical support for post-earthquake reconstruction and disaster prevention and mitigation strategies.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Si Zhao
AU  - Shizhou Yu
AU  - Jialong Fan
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/05/27
TI  - Evaluation and Analysis of Indirect Industrial Economic Losses Caused by the Wenchuan Earthquake
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 10th International Conference on Social Sciences and Economic Development (ICSSED 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 661
EP  - 674
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-734-2_73
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-734-2_73
ID  - Zhao2025
ER  -