It's arguable that I was premature in noting that Turkey would fare better in their recent earthquake than poorer countries might.
To some extent, given the continuing rise in the death count, my two earlier posts may seem callous.
Having said that, it's well established in economics that death tolls drop as real GDP per capita rises. The seminal paper in this literature is Kahn's 2005 paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics (if interested, an ungated working paper can be downloaded here).
Kahn looked at 57 countries over a 13 year span, totally over 4K disasters and over 800K deaths. His Figure 1 and Table 8 summarize the results that deaths are inversely related to GDP per capita, and that disasters are not more likely in poor areas. They're just not dealt with as well.
(Interestingly, his summary in Table 3 shows that Turkey is one of the worst countries for casualties from earthquakes).
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