https://phys.org/news/2018-12-vulnerable-impacts-tropical-cyclones.html

New research presented at the 2018 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. suggests that at the country level, how effective the national government is, along with how much exposure to the natural hazard a particular region or community faced, are both important factors in answering this question.

Researchers often use a country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and poverty rates as indicators of tropical cyclone vulnerability and mortality. While these factors are often good proxies for determining vulnerability, they make it difficult to parse out what is actually causing vulnerability and often don't account for how much exposure to the natural disaster a particular community or region experienced, according to Elizabeth Tennant, a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a research associate at Clark University who presented the new findings.