A human tragedy rather than economic

As rescue efforts swung into high gear in areas devastated by tidal waves around the Indian Ocean, economists said the impact on most of the region’s economies was unlikely to be severe despite the stunning human cost of the tragedy.

Although the scale of the disaster varied from site to site, the tsunamis’ damage was mostly confined to rural areas, with the region’s major industrial facilities and transport infrastructure largely unaffected, they said.

In addition, although there were heart-rending accounts from survivors and terrible images on television, the affected areas in Indonesia, India, Thailand and Malaysia were small when compared with the overall size of those countries, and their economies, they said.

Sri Lanka may have suffered much more intense economic damage, however.

“Not much industrial areas, or physical or economic infrastructure has been damaged: you have some farmland obviously, and some of the tourism sites look like disaster zones,” said Wong Keng Siong, economist for Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi in Singapore.

“But it seems more like a human tragedy than an economic one.”

Song Seng Wun, regional economist at GK Goh Research in Singapore, said: “You are not looking at a huge disruption to the productive side of the economy, although the difference is Sri Lanka.

"There you did get factories that were flooded away,” said

About 1.2 million foreigners were likely to cancel their trips to Thailand, resulting in lost revenue of €554.7m, said the Association of Thai Travel Agents.

“Tourism is really the industry that is going to get hit hardest by this. Even so, we don’t expect the impact to last longer than a year at the most,” said Rakesh Shankar, an economist who focuses on Asian economic issues at Economy.com in the US

Experts stressed Tuesday that some resorts could recover quickly, especially in Phuket, the Thai island where many hotels in areas not directly affected by the killer waves remained open.