A Tale of Two Earthquakes

Taiwan had a bad earthquake during this year's ECON 3020 class.

Turkey had a bad earthquake during last year's ECON 3020 class. 

The outcomes were not the same. And richness, as measured by nominal or PPP GDP per capita probably goes a long way towards explaining the differences.

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Full reveal: I badly missed on my subjective forecast of casualties from last year's quake in Turkey. I anticipated the country doing a lot better than it did, largely because it is richer than many suppose. I was wrong. In retrospect, it was a pretty big earthquake in a fairly poor area of Turkey. So I now see it as more similar to the smaller Iranian earthquake in 2003.

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The literature that economic growth is highly negatively correlated with deaths from natural disasters (mostly earthquakes) is fairly well-established (see here, here, here, and here). The second of those also points out that income inequality, which is fairly high in Turkey, is positively correlated with earthquake deaths. 

So, I do have a history of pointing out in ECON 3020 that high death tolls, say in Haiti in 2010 (here and here), are reprehensible but not surprising.

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Here's the details on these two recent quakes.

Taiwan had a 7.4 quake a few weeks ago, Turkey had a 7.8 a year ago. 

The last death toll I could find for Taiwan was 16. Turkey's death toll was 53,000. 

Do note that the Richter scale is logarithmic, so the shaking in Turkey was more than a little bit worse. Even so, Turkey also lost three times more than Japan did to 2011's 9.1 earthquake AND tsunami.

Nominal GDP per capita in Taiwan is 3-4 times higher than that of Turkey; using PPP it's still 75-100% higher.

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P.S. A contributing factor to Turkey's death toll may also be a lower standard of services provided to the large Kurdish minority near the epicenter.