HEALTH SYSTEM PERFORMANCE, DISASTER RESPONSE AND POLITICAL IDENTITIES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Szu-Hsien Ho (), Luke Okafor and Eric Yan
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Szu-Hsien Ho: Department of Economics, Feng Chia University, Taichung City 407102, Taiwan
Eric Yan: Department of Economics, Feng Chia University, Taichung City 407102, Taiwan

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2024, vol. 69, issue 05, 1743-1763

Abstract: In this paper, we developed a model to assess the government’s disaster response during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring variations across jurisdictions dominated by different political identities in the United States. The model defines an individual’s payoff as a positive function of his/her income and the government’s disaster response. The individual is more prone to wear a mask if the government is more responsive to the disaster during the pandemic, and there can be a lower income loss for the individual during the pandemic when he/she has higher compliance to the government’s order of face mask. Utilizing this model, we derive the government’s disaster response to be positively correlated with the impact of COVID-19 deaths on masking behavior and negatively correlated with the change of the death toll relative to income. This allows us to evaluate the unobserved disaster response of the government explicitly using regression results. We compare the government’s disaster response across jurisdictions dominated by different political identities in the United States. The results highlight a more resilient disaster response in Democratic states, translating into superior health system performance compared to their Republican counterparts. These findings emphasize the crucial role of policies designed to strengthen disaster response, especially in addressing collective action problems such as those posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate crises.

Keywords: Disaster response; health system performance; political identity; COVID-19; U.S (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 P00 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1142/S0217590824420013

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