If countries could choose their natural disasters, most would prefer floods over earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. That’s because floods, being easier to predict, generally wreak less social and economic havoc. But sometimes nations are unlucky enough to get both, like Japan and New Zealand this year. The Fukushima disaster that killed 24,000 people and stopped the economy almost stone dead resulted from an earthquake-triggered tsunami in the east of the country. According to the IMF’s latest report on Japan, its GDP will shrink by nearly one percent this year, and the speed of recovery is highly uncertain.

Similarly, the earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand’s second most populous city in February, killing 181, produced a rare seismological phenomenon known as liquefaction that brings water to the surface.

According to JP Morgan Chase & Co, total overall losses could reach $12bn. Calamities of this magnitude also spill over into other countries – the temporary shutdown of Japanese automobile plants hit suppliers, dealers and shippers among other industries all over the world.

There is, however, an upside to natural disasters. In what economists call a V-shaped recession, the economy bounces back once reconstruction gets under way. As early as next year, growth rates in Japan should hit nearly three percent and the IMF expects four percent for New Zealand.

As the following snapshot shows, natural disasters of all kinds do extract a high temporary economic price while leaving permanent damage to society and infrastructure.

- The Lisbon earthquake of November 1 1755 destroyed some of the period’s most valuable intellectual property when fires burned much of the city: including priceless public records, the royal library with its 70,000 volumes, and paintings by Titian, Rubens and Correggio.

- The bill for the eruption of Mount St Helens in Skamania County, Washington, in 1980 came to about $840m, mainly because of the poisoning of productive land from vast ash clouds, interruption to shipping and the destruction of forests.

- In 2004, the tsunamis triggered by the Indian Ocean earthquake wiped out entire coastal economies, including fishing fleets and low-lying crop farmers. Sri Lanka, for instance, lost two-thirds of its boats.

- Areas of high population invariably suffer the most. After Cyclone Tracy hit the Australian city of Darwin on Christmas Day of 1974, it took the best part of four years to rebuild. And New Orleans, one of the poorest regions of the US, still hasn’t recovered fully from Hurricane Katrina of August 2005. The economic impact of the disaster has been assessed at $150bn.

- And although the bill’s still not fully in, the ash cloud thrown out by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in six frenetic days in April 2010 cost transport and tourism companies in the EU somewhere between €1.5bn and €2.5bn, according to statistics published by the European Commission.

But it’s an ill volcano that doesn’t blow at least some good. Seismic activity can release geothermal energy, throw out precious stones and minerals, and even make farmland mineral-rich from volcanic ash.

That’s one reason why more than a million people live on the slopes of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius, the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted in the last hundred years; and why farmers on Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, which has been  erupting for nearly 500 years, can grow three crops a year.