Shokhin, Or How to Overthink it in Style

A battered economy?

This began with some thoughts on donor fatigue and a little curiousity on how natural disasters impact the global economy, but quickly dissolved into lazy data-monkeyesque poo-slinging.  Japan has been battered relentlessly with nature’s vile rage since humans began recording the weather, but until recently they were the world’s second largest economy.  I plotted quarterly change in Japan’s real GDP with the average magnitude of earthquakes that caused tsunamis in that quarter since 1980 in the vain hope that something might give but, hell, there’s not much statistical relationship.    Highly dependent on auto exports, the volatile Yen and an irascible tech industry, the economy has been surprisingly resilient to tsunamis.  What does seem to be evident is that, though medium-term development dollars may hold steady, the effects of these things are not felt for years down the line.  Kobe cost Japan $100 billion, economic growth held, but the city never returned to its princely state.

Data sources: The National Geophysical Data Center and the Japanese Bureau of Statistics.