Culture, Political Order, and COVID-19 Mortality.

Abstract

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS CHALLENGED countries’ capabilities of quick reaction, mobilization, governance, organization, and implementation, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of public policies. Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, some countries have performed excellently, while other countries have not performed well. Many studies have explored the COVID-19 pandemic from a variety of aspects and suggested some reasons for the differences in country performance.1 Motivated by this phenomenon and the emerging literature, this study identifies some important country-level factors that determine country performance fighting the COVID-19 pandemic—cultural background, state capacity, government capacity to effectively formulate and implement sound policies (hereafter referred to as government efficiency), and social trust—and conducts empirical investigation of how these factors are related to the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, we adopt the concepts of individual resources and societal resources to suggest a simple model. This model demonstrates that for each country, there exists a specific price ratio of individual resources to societal resources, and that ratio determines the optimal strategy for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of vaccines. We further build a theoretical framework to show that cultural background, government efficiency, and social trust can determine the price ratio of societal resources to individual resources in a country, and thereby determine the best strategies or responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second phase, we collect data from a variety of sources and empirically test the association between these factors and mortality due to COVID-19.