Do Rural Areas Experience the Same Benet as Urban Areas from Disasters?

This study makes a unique contribution to the economic and regional science literature on the impacts of disasters by focusing on an understudied area of scal impacts of disasters in rural areas. Specically, it focuses on the dierences in sales tax collections in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Ohio counties following a series of Derecho wind storms in the summer of 2012. We nd Appalachian counties experience a decrease in sales tax collections of $254,845 per county post storm compared to their non-Appalachian counterparts in the state. In total, the Appalachian region lost nearly $5.1 million in sales tax collections. We argue that the limited economic base of rural economies not only makes them less resilient to natural disasters, but also prevents them from experiencing the post-disaster economic and scal benets that often occur in urban areas.