countries, and requires a serious (humanitarian) commitment of donors, who are generally also directly responsible for the coordination of the aid interventions.

# **3 The Data**

## **3.1 Data Sources**

The main source of emergency data is the Emergency-Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED)<sup>7</sup> . The EM-DAT database covers over 15,900 natural and technological disasters since the beginning of the twentieth century. A disaster is defined as "a situation or event which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to the national or international level for external assistance, or is recognized as such by a multilateral agency or by at least two sources, such as national, regional or international assistance groups and the media".<sup>8</sup> The entry criterion for an event to be classified as natural disaster is to either have caused at least 10 fatalities, affected at least 100 people, to have triggered a declaration of state of emergency, to have led to an appeal for international assistance, or a combination of any of the above criteria. EM-DAT draws from a variety of public sources, including reports by governments, insurance companies, press and aid agencies. In 2003, about 27.9% of the data came from various US Government disaster agencies, 27% from insurance companies, 20% from UN organizations, 13.1% from press agencies, and the remaining 7% from various humanitarian organizations (Guha-Sapir et al., 2004). The EM-DAT database contains information on the severity of each disaster in terms of the total number of people killed (persons confirmed dead or missing and presumed dead) and affected (people requiring immediate assistance during the emergency period, including displaced or evacuated people).<sup>9</sup> From the EM-DAT we also get information on disaster type, country of occurrence and the timing of each emergency, which we use to merge disaster characteristics with funding records. The funding data we use in this paper, together with donors breakdown, come from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Financial Tracking System (FTS)<sup>10</sup> . FTS data on natural disaster funding start in 1992 and include governments’, together with private, NGOs’ and international agencies’ responses to Consolidated Appeals.<sup>11</sup> These data are quite different from the ones in the OECD’s DAC system commonly used in the ODA literature.

Humanitarian aid as defined in the DAC reporting scheme ("emergency and distress relief") contains "sudden natural or man made disasters, including war or severe civil unrest, food scarcity conditions arising from crop failure owing to drought, pest and diseases, as well as support for disaster preparedness" (OECD, 2007). The DAC data on emergency aid does thus not only contain large amounts of complex emergency aid as discussed in the previous section, but also expenses made for disaster prevention and refugee support. Using the FTS data has three main advantages: first, while the DAC system provides only annual totals for each donor-recipient pair, FTS records aid provided for each appeal separately, hence allowing to link directly aid flows to each individual disaster. Second, as opposed to the DAC system which primarily focuses on OECD donors, the FTS tracks aid flows of multilateral and private donors, providing an 5