Trust and Public Policy: Lessons from the Pandemic

Mausumi Das and Ajit Mishra
Additional contact information
Mausumi Das: Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

No 333, Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines the importance of mutual conÖdence or trust between a government and its citizens on the e§ectiveness of public policies.We develop a theoretical framework where the designing of government policies and the concomitant actions of the citizens are meditated by the degree of social trust. We introduce a short term aggregative health shock - a pandemic - which is novel: its charateristics are not fully known at the onset. This creates scope for government intervention in the form of framing of the policy announcement and its information content. We use this framework to examine the relationship between government communication, social trust and compliance. For any given level of trust, we analyse the equilibrium framing of the policy as well as the corresponding response and examine the degree of policy e§ectiveness as a function of the existing level of trust. JEL Codes: H11, I12, I18

Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2023-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pub and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cdedse.org/pdf/work333.pdf

Related works:
Chapter: Trust and Public Policy: Lessons from the Pandemic (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cde:cdewps:333

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cdedse.org/

The price is free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics Delhi 110 007. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sanjeev Sharma ().