From Mr. Trump, this morning:

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000……..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

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Following up on examples of the incredible and unsung success of the recovery effort in Puerto Rico described by Mr. Trump, from Begnaud/CBSNews:

What may be millions of water bottles. meant for victims of Hurricane Maria, have been sitting on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, since last year, according to @FEMA, which confirmed the news to me, late tonight, after pictures, posted today on social media, went viral.

If 2975 dead is a success, what does a failure look like?

But Mr. Trump did pass out some paper towel rolls.

A commentator [1] has recently concluded that excess mortality due to austerity in Puerto Rico exceeds that attributable to Hurricane Maria and its aftermath. I take issue with that conclusion.

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Hiro Ito has updated our de jure financial openness index through 2016, with all the data located at here, in Excel and Stata files.

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My guess [1] is it’s gonna rise again (not that it’s particularly low right now)

Figure 1: Categorical Economic Policy Uncertainty — (blue), Trade Policy Uncertainty (red), 2005-2010=100. Source: PolicyUncertainty, accessed 9/3/2018.

From Ascertainment of Estimated Excess Mortality from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, commissioned by the government of Puerto Rico, released today:

Total excess mortality post-hurricane using the migration displacement scenario is estimated to be 2,975 (95% CI: 2,658-3,290) for the total study period of September 2017 through February 2018.

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I’ve recently read some commenters talking about consumption behavior as if it’s a settled matter, particularly with respect to theory. Let me just put that idea to rest.
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Econbrowser has always welcomed a wide range of opinions and spirited discussion from commenters, and will continue to do so. To preserve civility of the discussion, we have two rules. First, comments referring to someone’s racial or ethnic characteristics will not be published. Second, we will block comments that are pure insults with no intellectual arguments.

In this post, I used IMF estimated data for predicting the counterfactual mortality levels, necessary to calculate excess deaths. It is important to note that by not taking into account the recent population decline, one is probably biasing down estimates of excess deaths.

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Compare this assessment (5/31/2018):

Thus, the data suggests that the hurricane accelerated the deaths of ill and dying people, rather than killing them outright. I would expect the excess deaths at a year horizon (through, say, Oct. 1, 2018) to total perhaps 200-400. Still a notable number, but certainly not 4,600.

With a contemporaneous prediction:

From the survey data, we estimated a mortality rate of 14.3 deaths (95% confidence interval [CI], 9.8 to 18.9) per 1000 persons from September 20 through December 31, 2017. This rate yielded a total of 4645 excess deaths during this period (95% CI, 793 to 8498), equivalent to a 62% increase in the mortality rate as compared with the same period in 2016.

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