It matters to be in good hands: the relationship between good governance and pandemic spread inferred from cross-country COVID-19 data

Munirul H Nabin,Mohammad Tarequl Hasan Chowdhury,Sukanto Bhattacharya

doi:10.1057/s41599-021-00876-w

Munirul H Nabin, Mohammad Tarequl Hasan Chowdhury + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00876-w

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Abstract

This study examines the relationship between good governance and pandemic control using month-wise COVID-19 pandemic data within a time window from April to September 2020. The study argues that countries with better governance are more capable of adopting and implementing appropriate policies and that such governments are considered more trustworthy by their people. Combined, these factors enable such countries to better control a pandemic like COVID-19. Using several measures of good governance and two measures of pandemic spread, namely the COVID-19 positive rate and the COVID-19 growth rate, this paper tests its argument econometrically in a sample of 185 countries. The results show the existence of a significant inverse relationship between all measures of good governance, and the COVID-19 positive and growth rates. The significant inverse relationship largely persists even after controlling for continent-fixed effects and a host of geographic, demographic, and socio-economic factors. This indicates the presence of a strong systemic linkage between quality of governance and pandemic control. The findings empirically strengthen the argument of eminent medical historians concerning the importance of effective governmental intervention for epidemic control. The study reveals that the quality of governance is a key factor in a country’s success in pandemic management and encourages further investigation.

Highlights

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devasted the entire world, the social sciences have seen two broad strands of literature emerge, targeting the pandemic and its control
The present paper investigates the relationship between good governance and control over the COVID-19 pandemic in a crosscountry setting worldwide, covering 185 countries, which is the largest number of countries considered far in such studies
Our findings reveal significant negative relationships between government effectiveness and both the COVID-19 positive rate and the COVID-19 growth rate, which are seen to persist even after controlling for continent fixed effects and a number of geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic factors

Summary

Introduction

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devasted the entire world, the social sciences have seen two broad strands of literature emerge, targeting the pandemic and its control. Perhaps more intriguingly, Toshkov et al (2020) reported that European countries with more centralized forms of government that scored relatively poorly on measures of government effectiveness, trust, and freedom tended to respond more quickly and decisively in controlling the spread of the pandemic than decentralized countries with better scores on those measures. This obviously counter-intuitive but very interesting finding warrants deeper investigation, as it goes against the findings of prior research on the relationship between government effectiveness and epidemic control (e.g., Menon-Johansson, 2005). Liang et al (2020) found a negative association between COVID-19 fatalities and government effectiveness, which is more consistent with intuitive notions

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