Yusuke MIYABUKURO

Factor Analysis on Operation Level Recovery of Industrial Sectors after the 2004 Chuetsu Great Earthquake

Supervisor: Shoji MATSUMOTO and Satoshi TSUCHIYA

Present-day society, in which population and asset are accumulated, becomes more dependent on lifeline utilities such as electricity, water and gas supplies. As a consequence, dysfunction of lifeline utilities due to various kinds of large disasters influences more significantly on community life and firm's business. In order to reduce the secondary loss, effective countermeasures should be carried out, such as reinforcing facilities themselves and building backup functions. For an industrial sector, damage of production equipment and working staffs also influences operation level.
This study conducted data analysis on damage and recovery of individual industrial sectors due to the 2004 Chuetsu Great Earthquake (Mid-Niigata Earthquake), which occurred on October 23rd. Major findings are; the effect of restoration activity (e.g. extending working hours, help from outside, alternate production in outside region) is shown up not as recovery curves of operation rate between the firms with/without such restoration activities, but as "a steeper slope" of the curve. As to financial support for business restoration, the result implies an inverse causal-effect relationship from expectation. It is not said that a firm with the financial support has achieved more rapid recovery. The data shows a trend that a firm with lower operation level in the aftermath (a more highly-damaged firm) obtains the financial support.
Secondly, we investigated resiliency on industrial operation against earthquake disaster. When we describe input-output relationship by a nested CES (constant elasticity of substitution) function, the substitution elasticity can be a resiliency index. It is estimated with the survey data. The result shows very small elasticity of substitution on two input factors for both manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors: electricity and production equipment. It implies that these two factors have more crucial effect on operation when they are disrupted. On the other hand, it is found the elasticity on gas input is relatively large.



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