Government responses, democracy, and COVID-19 containment: a cross-country study

Abstract

By drawing the monthly data of 33 advanced economies in 2020, this paper explores the effectiveness of government responses and the level of democracy in containing the COVID-19 spread. Our results show that the government responses effectively ‘flatten the curve’ of infected cases and death cases. Concomitantly, the higher level of democracy simultaneously contributes the joint effect with government responses to the lower association with the number of infected cases in these countries. However, it is more noticeable that this effect does not persist or significantly exhibit heterogeneous effects. These two aforementioned points contribute a shred of empirical evidence to the existing literature about the COVID-19 studies. Therefore, our study has some relevant policy implications.