The Effect of Health and Economic Costs on Governments’ Policy Responses to COVID‐19 Crisis under Incomplete Information

The COVID‐19 pandemic has become an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis. The present study has built a theoretical model and used it to develop an empirical strategy, analyzing the drivers of policy‐response agility during the outbreak. Our empirical results show that national policy r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPublic administration review Vol. 81; no. 6; pp. 1131 - 1146
Main Authors Bel, Germà, Gasulla, Óscar, Mazaira‐Font, Ferran A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken, USA Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.11.2021
American Society for Public Administration
Subjects
COVID-19
Crises
Delayed
Economic crisis
Epidemics
Expectations
Health care
Health care expenditures
Pandemics
Uncertainty
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Summary:The COVID‐19 pandemic has become an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis. The present study has built a theoretical model and used it to develop an empirical strategy, analyzing the drivers of policy‐response agility during the outbreak. Our empirical results show that national policy responses were delayed, both by government expectations of the healthcare system capacity and by expectations that any hard measures used to manage the crisis would entail severe economic costs. With decision‐making based on incomplete information, the agility of national policy responses increased as knowledge increased and uncertainty decreased in relation to the epidemic's evolution and the policy responses of other countries.
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ISSN:0033-3352
1540-6210
DOI:10.1111/puar.13394