Community and economic implications of large-scale emergencies and disasters - Term Paper Example

The recent disasters include the hurricane in the U.S in 2006, the Japan earthquake in 2011, the Pakistan flood in 2011 and the Indonesian tsunami of 2004. These are the most recent and notable natural disasters which have affected the entire world. The disasters take away lives of millions of people. We have seen that there have been thousands of children who have lost their parents due to these disasters. They can ruin entire countries and economies. One of the most notable disasters in history was the Indian Ocean Tsunami which affected Indonesia the most.

Other countries were also affected including India, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Statistics have shown that there have been more than 200, 000 deaths due to this historic disaster. It is one of the worst calamities in history. The tsunami caused severe problems for the economy. One of the most dreadful affects was on the tourist industry in these Asian countries. Tourism is one of the vital parts of the economy in countries like Thailand and Indonesia. The disaster caused the countries millions of dollars due to the effect on the tourist industry.

The tourist hotels and several buildings were extensively damaged. The effect on the tourist industry let to various other problems as the industry is related with hotels and there are a lot of people employed in the hotel sector. The people, therefore, got redundant and unemployment increased. Thailand’s stock market was also severely affected by the tsunami and the market fell by a large number of points. The bank of Thailand estimated a decline in GDP rate by 0.3 % due to the lack of investment.

There were very few investors who were likely to invest in Thailand. With the falling tourism industry, it was predicted that the GDP would fall further by 1% by the start of 2005 meaning a 1.3% decline in the Gross Domestic Product. In 2005, the year after the tsunami, the country faced a current account deficit of more than 6 billion dollars. The slowdown of