Abstract for: Flood damage in Bangkok: disaster or an opportunity for creative destruction

We attempt to evaluate the paths to recovery following the devastating floods in 2011 in Thailand, which submerged a large part of the country for five months and severely damaged the infrastructures and the economy. We use system dynamic to simulate the impact of flood and test the performance of post-flood recovery effort. Since most of Thailand’s economic activities are located in the capital, we set the boundary of our study to Bangkok metropolitan area. We build on Saeed’s model of Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction, which he has posited as fore-runner to Forrester’s Urban Dynamics model (Saeed 2010). We extend Saeed model to subsume the infrastructure aging chains and land constraints of the Urban Dynamics model. We also added to the model mechanisms for taxation and service provision as on ground in Bangkok. We study the damage recovery policies implemented by Thai government as well as those alluded to in Urban Dynamics. We find that encouraging new investment and reducing cost of capital help recovery to some degree. These policies paired with increasing demolition of old infrastructure seem to facilitate the recovery process.