Earthquakes and Volcanoes

Introduction:
As Humans beings living on earth we all have to succumb to a natural disaster of some sort. Whether that may be a severe thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane, or a Magnitude 9 earthquake there is always a financial consequence for most of these natural disasters. After a earthquake occurs the country affected by the earthquake has to rebuild and restructure their nation back to where it was before the earthquake occurred. The overall problem is a country that might not have sufficient funds to restructure after a earthquake could be a big problem to how the country can go back to where it was before.

My Hypothesis is a country with a low GDP that has been affected by a earthquake, will suffer a longer time than a country with a higher GDP that was affected by an earthquake. Magnitude would mean a lot on the recovery process but I think the country’s GDP is a huge factor to helping the recovery of the country and bringing it back to where it was before the earthquake occurred. If a country does not have sufficient funds to run effectively, it would be hard for them to recuperate from a disaster that has halted the country’s economic processes by destruction, death, and starvation.

Method:
The method I plan on using to interpret my data and check the validity of my hypothesis is look at the relationship of countries who had earthquakes in the recent years and look at the GDP of the country before the earthquake occurred and two years after the earthquake struck. The deadliest earthquakes from the years 2004-2011 will be used for the data because these are the earthquakes that caused the most damage and would affect a country’s GDP more drastically. I have chosen 5 countries to study China, Japan, Indonesia, Peru, and Haiti. I chose these countries because there is a vast difference in their GDP and it would show a wide variety of how the GDP could change.

Observations:
The graph below depicts the GDP rate before and after the earthquake occurred in a country. The time difference for the GDP was 2 years, which seemed like an adequate time for a country to help recover from a earthquake with a magnitude greater than seven. The Gross Domestic Product Growth Rate against the time after a disaster occurred measured the data. The X- axis represented the countries that experienced the earthquake, and the Y – axis represented the Growth Domestic Product Growth Rate (Percentage) for each country. The reason a bar graph was used was because the bar graph represented the change in GDP compared to a line graph and the visual representation could be clearly seen on the countries recovery from a earthquake. All the data represented from the graph came from cia.gov.

The data showed a trend that a country like Peru, was not prepared for a natural disaster compared to other countries across faults. Japan a country with a high GDP was able to gain some strength after the 2011 earthquake and even showed growth in their GDP rate. Indonesia was also able to show growth in GDP rate after the 2009 earthquake. China showed a drop in GDP after the 2008 earthquake. Haiti’s GDP rate stayed the same after the 2010 earthquake. The countries with the larger death tolls had more hard of a time recovering from the earthquake except for Japan.

Conclusion:
The Hypothesis did not have enough supporting data, The time frame did not exactly show the GDP rate during recovery. There were too many extraneous factors that led to the conclusion of my data. The fact that from 2008-2011 there was a global recession did not help the fact that the GDP would go down. I would also look more closely to the estimated cost of damages and the amount of aid received from foreign countries for the disaster.