Decentralization, intergovernmental coordination, and emergency response in East and Southeast Asia: lessons from combatting the COVID-19 pandemic

Sarah Shair-Rosenfield

No 2209, Working Papers. Collection A: Public economics, governance and decentralization from Universidade de Vigo, GEN - Governance and Economics research Network

Abstract: Despite region-wide lessons learned from the SARS pandemic in 2003, country responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in East and Southeast Asia have been very diverse. Outcomes have also varied widely, with some of the world’s lowest per capita case and death rates in Taiwan and Vietnam and extremely high per capita case and death rates in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. A common feature of many of these countries is their decentralized governance systems, most of which lack clear channels for coordination among different levels of government. I consider how government structure and political centralization shaped emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic in East and Southeast Asia. While the quantitative analysis shows that weak coordination may actually exacerbate problems in executing decentralization when responding to the pandemic, a paired comparison of Indonesia and the Philippines suggests the drawbacks of a decentralized but uncoordinated system.

Keywords: decentralization; emergency. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 H23 H77 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://infogen.webs.uvigo.es/WP/WP2209.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:gov:wpaper:2209

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers. Collection A: Public economics, governance and decentralization from Universidade de Vigo, GEN - Governance and Economics research Network Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patricio Sanchez-Fernandez ().