Effectively Managing Counterpart Support Aid, for Damages Incurred from Natural Disasters, by Utilizing the Indirect Economic Losses

Counterpart support (strategically coordinated disaster aid through partnership) policies provide guidance for emergency management and reconstruction, focusing upon short time period after natural disasters. However, determination of the quantitative levels of counterpart support remains a key challenge area in the literature, and practice. The goal of the research is to fill such gaps by introducing an index framework consisting of an inter-regional input-output model (IRIO) and a resilience index, where appropriate measures of indirect economic losses are developed from an IRIO, and the indirect economic losses are achieved by using the provincial economic resilience assessment index system. To examine the internal validity, including systematic error or bias, we investigated the reliability of the adopting models, calculation methods and index systems. To explore the external validity of the proposed measures and resilience index over the widely applied IRIO framework, data from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, an 8.0Ms earthquake that devastated parts of China, was utilized for obtaining parameter values of the framework. A follow-up investigation found that the fairness of counterpart support has been substantially enhanced and the satisfaction has been noticeably improved.