Understanding complex systems: economic impacts from catastropic events

Catastrophic events cause many kinds of impacts, including injuries, fatalities, damages to road, buildings, and other infrastructure, and often disrupt economic activity both inside and outside the affected area. In many cases, economic analysis of catastrophic events will be done in concert with physicsor system-based models that identify physical disruptions to the flow of goods and services (e.g., electric power, telecommunications, transportation) that cause economic activity in regions to be interrupted. Economic analysis methods can range from simple aggregated methods to more sophisticated approaches that capture the complex dynamics from initial event to recovery. This section presents a middle ground discussion of how one such method, namely input-output methods, can be used to estimate short-term economic impacts.