The Political Economy of Disaster by Lundahl Mats;

Author:Lundahl, Mats;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The way ahead

As it were, there does not seem to be anything inherently wrong with the statistical methodology used by the Schwartz group. The bottom line of the present discussion is that even though the approaches of the Michigan and Schwartz groups differ, for example with respect to the sample and weighting procedures, they both agree on the fundamental level: the government estimates of the death toll of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti are too high. This, in turn, leads to an inevitable follow-up question: Which was the methodology used by the government for arriving at the various death toll estimates reported at various times during the year following the earthquake? Was there any method, or are the various government estimates mere guesses? If there was an explicit method, did it contain any biases or omissions? And if not: How can the discrepancies between the estimates be explained?

The main lesson for future disasters is not what the best estimate in Haiti was, it is the need for a transparent methodology to produce the official statistics. The credibility of the international community is also at stake: Although many international staff privately questioned the credibility of the figures, all agencies and the mass media welcomed the highest figures possible for their own purposes (for fund raising, readership, or other motives).33

When the contents of the Schwartz report were made public, Robert Fatton noted: ‘If the figures are correct, it means that Haiti does not need as much money as it was thought before…. There are consequences.’34 This is of course what explains the unbalanced gut reactions to the report, like the one by Nienaber:

If USAID wanted to slap down the new Haitian government for criticizing the Clinton IHRC [Interim Haiti Recovery Commission], the … report would do the job nicely. Play down the death toll and the need for reconstruction and send a message that Haiti must still play by colonialist US rules. It would not matter in the end what the truth of the … report is. The headline that would stick in the donors’ minds is that the earthquake was not such a big deal after all. The threat of diminishing donations replaces the nice carrot and stick approach to Haiti with a bullwhip.35

The obvious counterargument is that it would be in the interest of the Haitian government to exaggerate the magnitude of the earthquake catastrophe in order to obtain more aid. ‘In the aftermath of most disasters, the number of deaths is a much-sought statistic by the mass media and the public. It is the most powerful figure to elicit emotions and generosity.’36

The exact number of dead is, however, not the main real issue. Even a lower death toll would leave all the other problems caused by the earthquake, including, then, a larger number of displaced people:

the amount of funding that a disaster deserves is closely linked in the public's eyes to the number of persons killed. It is indeed the recognition of this linkage which incites governments and agencies to opt for the highest figures possible.

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