Can Innovation Save Us? Understanding the Role of Innovation in Mitigating the Covid-19 Pandemic in ASEAN-5 Economies

Jerk Joshua Meire Layos and Paul John Pena

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic raises the question of whether innovation can save humanity. Indeed, as it always has, innovation is the path towards finding solutions such as vaccines, treatments and policies that mitigate the further spread of the virus. Since the announcement of a global pandemic on March 12, 2020, countries with relatively high levels of innovation remain high on the world rankings on new cases and deaths while countries considered relatively lower in innovation are not. We test the relationship between innovation systems and the ability of its pre-epidemic state to address the pandemic. We use a two-step System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to test this relationship using cases from the ASEAN-5 economies and their respective levels of innovation as reported in the Global Innovation Index. We find that the relationship between the level of innovation and a country’s ability to respond to the crisis to be significant and positive. We also find that search interest, an indicator of market response within an innovation context, to have a significant negative relationship with crisis management. We provide some preliminary analyses and insights on these two key findings as well as policy recommendations concerning innovation systems.

Keywords: coronavirus; covid-19; innovation systems; Triple Helix; ASEAN (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 I10 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100152/1/MPRA_paper_100152.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:100152

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().