Counting the cost of the tsunami

Reconstruction: counting the cost of the tsunami - at Moneyweek.co.uk - the best of the week's international financial media.

Over 100,000 people died in the wave that hit southeast Asia's coastal areas on Boxing day. Given the devastation, the cost to the region's industries is surprisingly low, says Simon Wilson.

How bad is itCurrent estimates suggest 150,000 have died. That's more than in any 20th-century tsunami, and makes the Indian Ocean earthquake a bigger killer than all but three or four earthquakes of the past hundred years. Moreover, Indonesian officials fear that their estimates of around 90,000 people killed in the northern Sumutra province of Aceh, close to the epicentre, may actually grossly understate the true picture. But this is not the worst natural disaster of recent decades. Bangladesh lost 500,000 people in the 1970 cyclone. And in Tangshan, China, an even greater number were killed by an earthquake in 1976.

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