Containment measures during the COVID pandemic: The role of non-pharmaceutical health policies

Michael Funke, Tai-kuang Ho and Andrew Tsang

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2023, vol. 45, issue 1, 90-102

Abstract: Many countries have imposed a set of non-pharmaceutical health policy interventions in an effort to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of this paper is to examine the effects of the interventions, drawing on evidence from the OECD countries. A special feature here is the mechanism that underlies the impact of the containment policies. To this end, a causal mediation analysis decomposing the total effect into a direct and an indirect effect is conducted. The key finding is a dual cause-effect channel. On the one hand, there is a direct effect of the non-pharmaceutical interventions on the various health variables. Beyond this, a quantitatively dominant indirect impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions operating via voluntary changes in social distancing is shown.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; non-pharmaceutical interventions; mediation analysis; causal effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C26 C54 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893822001193
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jpolmo:v:45:y:2023:i:1:p:90-102

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2022.12.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Policy Modeling is currently edited by A. M. Costa

More articles in Journal of Policy Modeling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().