Abstract
The COVID‐19 pandemic has become an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis. The present study has built a theoretical model and used it to develop an empirical strategy, analyzing the drivers of policy‐response agility during the outbreak. Our empirical results show that national policy responses were delayed, both by government expectations of the healthcare system capacity and by expectations that any hard measures used to manage the crisis would entail severe economic costs. With decision‐making based on incomplete information, the agility of national policy responses increased as knowledge increased and uncertainty decreased in relation to the epidemic's evolution and the policy responses of other countries.
Highlights
The coronavirus outbreak has produced an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis, becoming a transboundary crisis as characterized in Boin (2019)
We build a theoretical model, based on which we develop an empirical strategy to analyze the drivers of the agility of policy response to the outbreak
Results show that the distance to Wuhan is a significant factor in the agility of policy response
Summary
The coronavirus outbreak has produced an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis, becoming a transboundary crisis as characterized in Boin (2019). Our empirical results show that government overconfidence in its own country capacity of health services and the intensity of expected economic costs from hard measures to manage the crisis delayed policy response.
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