Determining the Amount of Sustainable International Aid that Countries Should Donate After Disaster: A New Frame, Indices and Method

Disasters are a serious challenge to human development and because climate change natural disasters are becoming more frequent. International aid, which can effectively alleviate resultant losses, has become an important way for humans to resist disasters cooperatively. Relevant research on how much each country should donate sustainably is barely seen. Against such a background, by taking into account indirect economic loss to and payment ability of donors, this paper propose the novel frame and detail input-output model for determining the amount of international aid that countries and multilateral organizations should allocate to disaster-stricken countries. To validate our method, the May 12th Wenchuan earthquake of 2008 is taken as example, and the indirect economic loss to each country is calculated based on the world input-output tables. Assuming that the total amount of aid is unchanged, the greater the indirect economic loss and payment ability are, the larger the amount of aid should be. Otherwise, the smaller the amount of aid should be. Based on the China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs statistics, the results show that among the 41 donors, 6 countries including Indonesia, Australia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and Japan donated too much while 23 countries such as India donated too little. Next, the recommended amount of aid is given by considering the indirect economic loss to and payment ability of each country. The advantage of this framework and method lines in that the calculation results are objective and concise, while the disadvantage is that the indirect economic loss is relatively large and the recommend donate is uncertain. This paper demonstrates a new perspective for the study of standards for determining the amount of international aid that countries and multilateral organizations should provide.