The Impact Of Earthquake On Economic Growth And Its Influencing Channel In Xinjiang Province

In this paper, we use panel data of 13 areas in Xinjiang Province from 1999-2011 to empirically examine the impact of earthquake on economic growth and its influence path The results show that, when the impacts of control variables such as education, investment, government spending, population, incremental fixed assets and health care level on GDP growth are considered, earthquakes have statistically positive relationship with economic growth in short term in Xinjiang Province. And earthquakes also have statistically positive relationship with primary and secondary industry, but have no significant relationship with tertiary industry. To verify the above results, we use panel data of 31 Provinces in Mainland China from 1990 to 2011 to make empirical analysis, and proved the positive relationship between earthquake losses and GDP growth again. To find the channels through which earthquakes influence economic growth, we theoretically analyze the.effects of changes in each factor, which are caused by earthquakes (taken as exogenous shocks), on economic growth using Cobb-Douglas production function with constant return to scale. Furthermore, we conduct empirical research and find that earthquakes have little impact on all three factors and we try to explain this result with several reasons.