Fighting the COVID pandemic: National policy choices in non-pharmaceutical interventions

Vincenzo Alfano, Salvatore Ercolano and Mauro Pinto

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2022, vol. 44, issue 1, 22-40

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic pushed countries to adopt various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Due to the features of the pandemic, which spread over time and space, governments could decide whether or not to follow policy choices made by leaders of countries affected by the virus before them. In this study, we aim to empirically model the adoption of NPIs during the first wave of COVID-19 in the 14 European countries with more than 10 million inhabitants, in order to detect whether a policy diffusion mechanism occurred. By means of a multivariate approach based on Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis, we manage to derive three clusters representing different behaviour models to which the different European countries belong in the different periods of the first wave: pre-pandemic, summer relaxation and deep-lockdown scenarios. These results bring a two-fold contribution: on the one hand, they may help us to understand differences and similarities among European countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak and guide future quantitative or qualitative studies; on the other, our findings suggest that with minor exceptions (such as Sweden and Poland), different countries adopted very similar policy strategies, which are likely to be due more to the unfolding of the pandemic than to specific governmental strategies.

Keywords: COVID-19; NPIs; Policy diffusion; Policy convergence; CA; PCA; OxCGRT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 I18 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jpolmo:v:44:y:2022:i:1:p:22-40

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2021.11.003

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