Modeling spatial economic impacts of an earthquake: input‐output approaches

Economic modeling issues for measuring damages and losses from disasters and their impacts are complex. The questions surrounding the potential economic effects of a disaster have been studied and discussed in various aspects. Input‐output analysis has been employed in many studies to measure and evaluate the economic impacts of disasters, mainly because of the ability to reflect the structure of regional economy in great detail. Whereas they provide useful information regarding the economic impacts and consequences and about the resource allocation strategies to minimize the losses and impacts, many of these studies have failed to investigate the dynamic nature of impact path over space and time, due to the difficulties to obtain such data and also to the static nature of input‐output framework. In order to analyze the spatial impacts of a disaster, Miyazawa's extension to the conventional input‐output framework is employed and is applied for the case of the Great Hanshin Earthquake.