we take the natural log of the rate of per capita deaths, rather than the raw level<sup>2</sup> . A summary of the numbers of deaths, by event type and by region, can be found in Table 1.0.

We measure the quality of formal institutions using the Worldwide Governance Indicators, released annually by the World Bank (Kaufmann, Kraay and Maastruzzi 2008). The Worldwide Governance Indicators are a set of six composite indices compiled using an unobserved components model based on over 300 items and over 30 data sources, and serve to track the functioning of basic qualities of the state such as the transparency of political processes or the quality of the bureaucracy. From the six indices compiled annually by the project, we include measures for Voice and Accountability, Government Effectiveness and Control of Corruption. The Voice and Accountability measure is an index of the degree of citizen involvement in public decision-making through elections and civic rights; the Government Effectiveness measure is an index of the quality of the bureaucracy and its efficiency in delivering public goods and services; the Control of Corruption measure is an index of the extent to which public officials use their position for private gain, for example through bribes, extortion, and embezzlement (Kaufmann and Kraay 1999).

Finally, we measure informal institutions using the Indices of Social Development (ISD), developed within the Social Development Department of the World Bank (World Bank 2008). The Indices of Social Development combine 200 items, from some 25 sources, into five social institutional clusters: gender equity, intergroup cohesion, interpersonal safety and trust, clubs and associations, and civic activism. For each cluster, items are combined using a latent variables approach, as adopted in the generation of the Worldwide Governance Indicators and Transparency International’s Corruptions Perceptions Index (Kaufmann et al 1999, 2007; Lambsdorff 2006). The intuition behind these procedures is that each set of indicators represents some implicit value of the underlying phenomenon in each society, on differing scales, with differing country samples, and with varying degrees of measurement error. The first cluster, gender equity, estimates levels of discrimination against women, and includes data on health, educational, and wage-related gender disparities, as well as data on the norms of discrimination that sustain these over time, such as the proportion of managers who believe men have more right to a job than women, or the proportion of parents who believe that boys should be prioritised in access to education. The second area, intergroup cohesion, reflects the extent of social conflict among ethnic, religious, or other social identity groups, using data on overt conflict, such as ratings on the level of ethnic and religious tensions, or the number of riots, assassinations, and acts of terrorism. The third area, interpersonal safety and trust, is an enhanced measure of general social trust, and brings together standard social trust items with data on the “trustworthiness” of others, based on criminal and related activity. The fourth area, clubs and associations measures the level of engagement in local associations and networks. Strength of community is measured using data on levels of engagement in local voluntary

> 2 Regressions models were also estimated using the raw (untransformed) rate of deaths from natural disasters. However, in these models no variables emerge as significant due to the leveraging effect of outliers.

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