The above discussion on PEFA serves to demonstrate that while countries appear to be good at staying within the confines of the budget set when unforeseen expenditures occur and the contingency budget is used few countries appear to have adequate tracking mechanisms. The same is true of any off budget expenditures. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that tracking post disaster expenditures is notoriously difficult as these expenditures are normally off budget and drain any available contingency funds. Couple this with the fact that only a few countries have disaster expenditure tracking systems and it becomes a little more obvious as to why most evidence on post disaster expenditures is often anecdotal at best and non-existent at worst.

Those countries, such as Peru, where there are disaster tracking systems in place, still face problems with identifying what the money was used for. Post disaster expenditures often involve third parties from the international donor community and the expenditures remain offbudget; or, they are ex-ante disaster risk reduction expenditures which are often more difficult to track given the cross-cutting nature of the investment. The 2004 tsunami in Acheh and Nias in Indonesia saw over 300 contributions from a variety of institutions towards reconstruction efforts, financing over 1,500 projects (Fengler et al, 2008).

# _A.2 Post Disaster Needs Assessments (PDNAs)_

These are often a good source of information on the extent of post disaster expenditures are conducted shortly after the event. These assessments generally feature a recovery and reconstruction framework. These give an indication of the potential burden on the fiscal purse. Table 1 indicates the public share of the total damage and loss, which ranges from 10 to 70 percent. This goes some way to demonstrate the level of contingent liability a country may face following a disaster. While some money may come from the international community, insurance, loans (concessional or otherwise) the Government will still be left to fund many initiatives to support the full recovery.

The 2010 floods in Thailand demonstrate just how large these funding requirements can be, the five year recovery and reconstruction plan is estimated to cost US$50 billion, ten times the estimates of the damage and loss incurred from the flooding (Government of Thailand, 2010). Recovery and reconstruction frameworks are developed using the principle of build back better, that is improving the build quality of any destroyed or damaged assets to a higher quality in order that they become more resilient. This can at times often provide a window of opportunity for governments and the international community to incorporate or accelerate other key development projects. Both of these elements could have played a factor in the large recovery and reconstruction program for Thailand when you consider that only 10 percent of the identified damage and loss was to assets and income streams held by the public sector. Further, such a large program is likely to place expansionary pressure on a government’s fiscal deficit. This was the case in Myanmar following tropical cyclone Nargis in 2008. The fiscal deficit increased form 3.4 percent in 2008 to 3.7 percent in 2009 and was in part attributed to tropical cyclone Nargis (ADB, 2010).

18