Seismic risk is public, centrally produced, widely distributed, has low occurrence frequency and, in most of the cases, is out of the control of those who might be affected. Although the idea that little if anything can be done in order to reduce risk in the already built environment is admitted by many people, its reduction is possible by using corrective measures meant to increase the overall seismic safety at community level. Besides the damages and losses that can occur in the built stock as a consequence of an earthquake, as well as the consequent secondary losses in industrial and distribution chains, casualties, both in terms of injured and fatalities, needs to be taken into account. The latter are to be expressed in terms of lost economic production, which can alter the economic development of the affected areas and of the countries. The inherent uncertainties in the whole risk assessment process require the use of probabilistic seismic risk models. Such models have been developed worldwide with the aim of providing information about the potential losses due to earthquakes in the areas under analysis and the estimations are usually performed in terms of direct physical damage. By gathering extra information about the occupation levels and using damage functions that account for injuries and deaths, it is possible to obtain losses in the human dimension and, therefore, to integrate them within comprehensive and holistic risk assessments. The author of this thesis proposes a methodology to integrate the average annual loss in the human dimension with public policies by estimating, in a prospective way, the average annual lost economic production due to premature loss of lives. At the same time, the obtained results allow interpreting which should be the minimum public investment in corrective measures in order to increase seismic safety. The continuous development of new corrective measures in order to increase the seismic safety levels is an activity that has gained attention and, at the same time, received resources during the last decades, mainly in the developing countries. Anyhow, the investments have been closely related to the availability of resources from donors, which are usually multilateral development organizations and banks. Those interventions have proven to be cost-effective by being based on methodologies which objectively quantify the required resources, such as the one proposed in this thesis; for this reason, it is suggested that a formal allocation of resources can be made. The methodology works at different geographic scales so that the results derived after its application can be of interest for different stake-holders and decision-makers at different levels. It has been applied at country level in 29 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, in Spain, at subnational level in Colombia and at urban level in Medellín.