- 1 What?
- 2 Why?
- 3 How?
- 4 And?
- 5 Bibliography
1 What?
The paper examined the impacts of the 2016 Formosa disaster, as well as the coping behavior of Vietnamese fishers.
Novel approach: Using satelline data to detect night-time boats in Vietnam’s exclusive economics zone (eez), and relates it to employment data from the Vietnamese labor force surveys.
2 Why?
Existing studies on the effects of man-made environmental disasters in developing countries, due to capacity and budget constraints, and sometimes political sensitivities, are rare.
- April 6, 2016
- Over two tons of farm-raised saltwater groupers and red snappers died in Ky Anh district, Ha Tinh. Wild fish carcasses also reported to had been washed ashore in mass in Vung Ang sea, Ha Tinh.
- April 10–15, 2016
- fish carcasses started to be found along the seaside of southern provinces: Quang Binh and Quang Tri, and Thua Thien-Hue.
- April 26, 2016
- The Thua Thien-Hue Department of Natural Resources and Environment examined the water sample in Lang Co lagoon and Lang Co seaport and confirmed that the seawater was heavily polluted, which was the cause of mass fish death.
- May 4, 2016
- The Vietnamese government announced a double-ban on both fishing activity and the processing and selling of seafood caught within 20 nautical miles of central Vietnam provinces, worrying that contaminated seafood in the region might not meet safety standards.
- June 30, 2016
- The Minister of Natural Resources and Environment announced that phenol and cyanide were the main and direct cause of mass fish deaths. These toxic substances were discharged illegally to the ocean by Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Co., Ltd. The government held a press conference on the same day and stated that Formosa was the perpetrator of mass death of fish along the seaside of four provinces: Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri and Thua Thien Hue. Formosa agreed to settle for an immediate remedial compensation package worth $500 million usd.
- July 2016
- Official reports documented that the total loss had amounted to over 322 tonnes of both wild and caged sea lives across the coast of the four affected provinces.
This paper follows the literature of disaster impacts on economies, for review see Dell et al (2014).
3 How?
- Data
- Labor Force Survey (lfs) in 2015 and 2016
- Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (viirs) – specificially the Boat Detection Module (vbd), which processes worldwide night-time ocean light emitted from fishing boats.
- Method
- Difference-in-differences with
- Dependent variable: Income from fishing jobs and total income
- Treatment indicator: workers living in Formosa – affected provinces
- Control for: geographic, industry
The treatment provinces are split into two group: upstream (Ha Tinh & Quang Binh) and downstream (Quang Tri and Hue)
To examine the coping mechanism, province-by-province ates on fishing intensity along the coast of each of the northern and central Vietnam.
4 And?
- The spillover effect is southern areas including Da Nang and Quang Nam. The impact does seem to dissipate for region further away south, becoming insignificant starting from Quang Ngai.
- The fishers capable of traveling to uncontaminated fishing zones did likely resort to this option in order to sustain fishing as an income-generating activity.
5 Bibliography
Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. 2014. “What Do We Learn from the Weather? the New Climate-Economy Literature.” Journal of Economic Literature 52 (3):740–98. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.52.3.740.
This post is in the collection of my public reading notes.