Socio-economic exposure to natural disasters

Even though the correct assessment of risks is a key aspect of the risk management analysis, we argue that limited effort has been devoted in the assessment of comprehensive measures of economic exposure at very low scale. For this reason, we aim at providing a series of suitable methodologies to provide a complete and detailed list of the exposure of economic activities to natural disasters. We use Input-Output models to provide information about several socio-economic variables, such as population density, employment density, firms' turnover and capital stock, that can be seen as direct and indirect socio-economic exposure to natural disasters. We then provide an application to the Italian context. These measures can be easily incorporated into risk assessment models to provide a clear picture of the disaster risk for local areas. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved.