Abstract
Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a country related to COVID-19, in the timing of the NPI responses. We first show that public attention depends strongly on whether there are cases in own country. We then show that countries with high levels of public attention are more likely to implement non-pharmaceutical interventions, even after controlling for the number of cases and deaths. Finally, we show that the extent to which a government responds to public attention is highly dependent on the country's institutional quality. The positive effect of public attention on policy implementation is driven entirely by countries with good institutions.
Highlights
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first observed in China in December 2019
Many European countries and the United States have been criticized for being too slow to introduce non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) measures limiting the spread of the COVID-19 virus (Odone et al 2020; Haffajee and Mello 2020)
To examine when and to what extent people around the world were alerted to the pandemic, we obtained the daily share of searches related to the COVID-19 of all Google searches in 174 countries from 1 January to 31 March 2020
Summary
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world’s largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author
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