Abstract: Natural disasters bring significant economic damages globally. Governmental initiated disaster reliefs, especially disaster relief transfers from the central government to local regions, play an important role of reducing damage and help economic recovery for local governments. We use typhoon disaster in China as a special case to analyze the responsiveness of central government for local disaster exposures and potential factors impacting central government's transfer efforts. By exploiting both geographic and year-to-year variations of typhoon exposure at the county level, we found that the central government responds to the current year typhoon exposure by increasing targeted transfers to local regions. Transfer efforts are significantly driven by local vulnerability, instead of political connection and governmental efficiency. Local fiscal competition effects are observed, among both geographic neighbors and administrative neighbors.
Keywords: Disaster Relief, Governmental Responsiveness, Typhoon
JEL Codes: H77, H72, Q54