How a poverty alleviation policy affected comprehensive disaster risk reduction capacity: Evidence from China's great western development policy

Although it is well established that natural disasters of all kinds give rise to poverty, and poverty deteriorates the disaster loss, few studies have empirically proposed a comprehensive framework to break down the vicious circle. Our study proposed that poverty alleviation policy with governmental accountability can give rise to socio-economic development, and can facilitate the implementation of disaster risk reduction policy. Focusing on the Great Western Development (GWD) policy, our study conducted an index of comprehensive disaster risk reduction and used regression discontinuity design to explore the effect of poverty alleviation policy on the index. Ultimately, the results of regression discontinuity design demonstrated that there was a noticeable jump effect in the index of comprehensive disaster risk reduction from non-targeted regions to policy-targeted regions, namely, anti-poverty policy had a positive effect on disaster risk reduction. Our study highlighted that the primary focus of GWD has been on considerable public investments to improve basic infrastructure, which can directly increase the comprehensive capacity of disaster risk reduction. Hence, disaster risk reduction should be a priority initiative of poverty alleviation policy to break down the vicious "poverty-natural disaster" circle.