Empirical Study about Effective Personnel Support by Local Governments during

Emergency Response and Relief after the Great East Japan Earthquake

Abstract

Preceding studies on inter-government aid giving and receiving activities have focused mainly on the activities of aid providing municipalities. In the present study, 19 out of 27 disaster-hit Miyagi and Iwate municipalities and Fukusima prefecture that received personnel support responded to survey questionnaires. Another set of questionnaires were sent to 1,796 Kobe city staff members who were dispatched to Tohoku disaster-hit municipalities and 1,254 responses were collected. An initial exploratory canonical correlation analysis suggested two sets of variables, the established aid work and the extended aid work. The final multivariate regression analysis on the effectiveness of the support as viewed from both aid-giving and aid receiving local governments showed a good fit to the obtained data.