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The role of human and social capital in earthquake recovery in Nepal

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 167–173 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Human and social capital help households cope with disastrous shocks. We analyse panel survey data from before and after the 2015 Nepal earthquakes to disentangle the association between post-earthquake income recovery of households and their social and human capital before the earthquake. Our analysis uses multidimensional measures of human and social capital and a machine-learning algorithm, the Bayesian additive regression tree. This approach helps us address measurement and estimation challenges that commonly affect social science analyses of observational data with many covariates and confounding variables. Our analysis shows the relative association of human capital with income recovery is greater on average than that of social capital, human and social capital serve as partial substitutes for each other when it comes to household income recovery, and the association of different capitals with economic recovery is nonlinear and heterogeneous across household education levels. Our results suggest that disaster-support policies can be structured with respect to human and social capital endowments to support more effective recovery of disaster-affected households.

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Fig. 1: Nepal earthquake magnitude and damage.
Fig. 2: Predicted household income change by human capital and social capital.
Fig. 3: Predicted household income change for various combinations of human and social capital.

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Data availability

The data (in comma-separated values/CSV file format) are available in Supplementary Data 1. It includes the dataset for the main analysis. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code used for the analysis is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (RAPID: Global Dependence of Livelihoods on Forests and the Impacts of Forest Investments: Disaster Recovery in Nepal (SES-1636754)). We also acknowledge X. Wang for his support on statistical analysis and A. Aekakkararungroj for his support on spatial map generation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Wenman Liu & Arun Agrawal

  2. Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Elisabeth Gerber & Arun Agrawal

  3. Division of Resource Economics and Management, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Suhyun Jung

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  1. Wenman Liu
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  2. Elisabeth Gerber
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  3. Suhyun Jung
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Contributions

E.G. and A.A. designed the research and managed data collection. W.L. cleaned and managed the data. W.L. designed the analytical framework and carried out initial and subsequent data analysis. W.L. and S.J. carried out additional data analysis and robustness checks. W.L., A.A., E.G. and S.J. wrote and revised the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Arun Agrawal.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Beate Volker and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Note 1.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Dataset for the main analysis.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

Source data for Fig. 2.

Source Data Fig. 3

Source data for Fig. 3.

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Liu, W., Gerber, E., Jung, S. et al. The role of human and social capital in earthquake recovery in Nepal. Nat Sustain 5, 167–173 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00805-4

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