ifo Institute: Public Discussion Drives Policy Responses to Pandemic

The more the pandemic was publicly discussed, the faster politicians responded with measures. These are the conclusions of a study by the CESifo research network. The differences in response time are considerable: Switzerland introduced measures against the virus fastest, three days after the first cases of Covid-19 were reported. In Ireland, the delay was eight days, in South Korea 11 days. Among the slowest countries to respond were the US (34 days), Belgium (35 days), and the UK (45 days).

Delayed political responses to the coronavirus pandemic resulted in rapidly increasing numbers of infections. “Our results show that strong awareness among the general public led to a quick response on the part of policymakers and thus to fewer infections in the respective countries,” says Panu Poutvaara, Director of the ifo Center for International Institutional Comparisons and Migration Research and co-author of the study. Chief among the political responses were lockdown measures and restrictions on personal contact.

The study is based on data from the Google Health Trends API, collected daily for 174 countries in the period from January 1 to March 31, 2020. The basis for determining the policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic was provided by the Oxford Government Response Tracker. Covid-19 infection rates and fatalities are based on the data collected by Johns Hopkins University.