Earthquakes economic costs through rank-size laws

TL;DR

This paper analyzes earthquake magnitude distributions in Italy using rank-size laws and proposes an economic impact indicator based on the relationship between earthquake magnitudes and costs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel economic impact measure for earthquakes by applying rank-size laws and modeling the cause-effect relation between magnitudes and costs.

Findings

Regularities in earthquake magnitudes identified

A new economic impact indicator proposed

Insights into infrastructure resistance effects

Abstract

This paper is devoted to assess the presence of some regularities in the magnitudes of the earthquakes in Italy between January $24^{th}$, 2016 and January $24^{th}$, 2017, and to propose an earthquakes cost indicator. The considered data includes the catastrophic events in Amatrice and in Marche region. To our purpose, we implement two typologies of rank-size analysis: the classical Zipf-Mandelbrot law and the so-called universal law proposed by Cerqueti and Ausloos (2016). The proposed generic measure of the economic impact of earthquakes moves from the assumption of the existence of a cause-effect relation between earthquakes magnitudes and economic costs. At this aim, we hypothesize that such a relation can be formalized in a functional way to show how infrastructure resistance affects the cost. Results allow us to clarify the impact of an earthquake on the social context and might serve for strengthen the struggle against the dramatic outcomes of such natural phenomena.