The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday forced multinational companies to close factories, fight fires and move workers, inflicting at least short-term damage on the Japan's fragile economy.
Assessing the full economic impact was impossible in the hours after the quake. But traffic clogged streets, trains stopped, flights were grounded and phone service was disrupted or cut off. U.S. companies DuPont and Procter & Gamble said communications problems made it hard to gauge the effect on their operations in Japan.
Japanese stocks plunged. The benchmark Nikkei index fell 1.7 percent, and the Japanese market was open for only about 15 minutes after the quake.
Still, the damage to Japan's economy, the world's third-largest, wasn't nearly as severe as it might have been. The devastated northeastern coastal region is far less developed than the Tokyo metro area.
"Something similar hitting Tokyo Bay would have been unimaginable," said Michael Smitka, an economist who specializes in Japan at Washington and Lee University.
And in the long run, the disaster could help the Japanese economy as reconstruction projects put people back to work.
Natural disasters "do eventually boost output," said David Hensley, an economist at JPMorgan Chase. The 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the 1994 Northridge quake outside Los Angeles, for example, ultimately helped the local California economies, he said.
Takuji Okubo, an analyst at French bank Societe Generale, said industrial production in Japan fell 2.6 percent in January 1995, the month of the devastating earthquake near the city of Kobe. But it rebounded 2.2 percent the following month and 1 percent the month after that.
On Friday, Japanese auto companies halted production at some assembly plants. But it was not clear whether the catastrophe would have a major effect on the global auto industry. Japan's central Aichi prefecture, site of much of the country's auto manufacturing, is far from the disaster zone.
Analysts said the damage to production seemed limited. But the status of the ports and roads that automakers rely on to move their vehicles remains unclear.
