Serbia: Community Resilience: Resilient Financing: The Economic Costs of Natural Disasters, The Case Study of 2014 Floods in Serbia

Report Summary

Investment in the prevention of disasters can have remarkable effects on avoiding loss of life and reducing human tragedy. Beyond the effect that investment in disaster prevention has on a humanitarian scale (effects which are seldom captured in economic analyses),such investments can also provide considerable economic benefits and cost savings to host countries which would otherwise be saddled with increased expenditures post-disaster. This report is focused on the case of the floods which hit Serbia in May 2014, to devastating effect, and analyzes statistical data to compare expenditures on prevention with expenditures on response and recovery in the country as it recovered.