Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is considered to be the world’s most urgent health disaster and the greatest challenge humanity has faced since World War II. One of the most significant concerns is the effectiveness of the extraordinary efforts undertaken around the world to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This study applied the Westerlund cointegration test and the Pooled Mean Group–Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PMG-ARDL) model to investigate the effectiveness of government policy measures in reducing the COVID-19 pandemic using weekly data for the period 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2021. The results of the Westerlund cointegration test validate the presence of a cointegration relationship between government policy measures and the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, results of PMG-ARDL show that economic support, stringency, and health and containment measures play a significant role in reducing the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study concluded that pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical measures have a substantial impact on mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic in South Asia. Policy implications such as government financial support for poor families, stringency, and health and containment measures must be adopted during the pandemic to curb/reduce the spread of COVID-19. Furthermore, it is also recommended to provide vaccines free of charge to developing countries and a stimulus package to support health research to expand the capacity for rapid vaccine in this region.
Highlights
The coronavirus infectious disease pandemic (COVID-19) is evolving at a frantic pace, driven by the transmission of new variants of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
2020 in Western Europe, several worrisome variants (VOC) were identified, including the B.1.1.7 first developed in the UK in September 2020, the B.1.351 variant developed in South Africa in December 2020, the P.1 developed in Brazil in January 2021 and the
The core objective of this study was to assess the impact of policy measures adopted by the South Asian countries in reducing the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
The coronavirus infectious disease pandemic (COVID-19) is evolving at a frantic pace, driven by the transmission of new variants of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). New variations of SARS-CoV-2 emerged throughout the second part of 2020 and early 2021. 2020 in Western Europe, several worrisome variants (VOC) were identified, including the B.1.1.7 first developed in the UK in September 2020, the B.1.351 variant developed in South Africa in December 2020, the P.1 developed in Brazil in January 2021 and the ‘Indian’ variant B.1,617 first reported in Maharashtra, India, in July 2020 [1]. There are some notable variations in the behavior of COVID-19 in different regions. As of 17 September 2021, there were approximately 37.42 million
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