The impact of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on GDP growth: Does strategy matter?

Michael König and Adalbert Winkler

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: We analyze whether and to what extent strategies employed by governments to fight the COVID-19 pandemic made a difference for GDP growth developments in 2020. Based on the strength and speed with which governments imposed non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) when confronted with waves of infections we distinguish between countries pursuing an elimination strategy and countries following a suppression / mitigation strategy. For a sample of 44 countries fixed effect panel regression results show that NPI changes conducted by elimination strategy countries had a less severe effect on GDP growth than NPI changes in suppression / mitigation strategy countries: strategy matters. However, this result is sensitive to the countries identified as “elimination countries” and to the sample composition. Moreover, we find that exogenous country characteristics drive the choice of strategy. At the same time our results show that countries successfully applying the elimination strategy achieved better health outcomes than their peers without having to accept lower growth.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0259362 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 59362&type=printable (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:plo:pone00:0259362

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259362

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().