Santiago Lago-Peñas, ICePP director Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, and Agnese Sacchi have released a working paper called “Country Performance during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Externalities, Coordination and the Role of Institutions.” In it, they focus on the role played by institutions at the country level in fighting the spread of Covid-19 by making policy coordination more difficult or, on the contrary, more effective. Aspectes considered include the type of political regimes, political fragmentation and decentralization settings, using the most recently available information on Covid-19 performance for up to 115 countries around the world. Their main results show that having either democracies or autocracies does not represent a crucial issue for successfully addressing the pandemic. Most significantly, countries with centralized political parties, which fundamentally allow for better coordination at the national level, perform significantly better than those with decentralized ones and the assignment of policy responsibilities to sub-national governments is an impediment in fighting the Covid-19 emergency.
Read the full working paper here.
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The International Center for Public Policy has published a working paper series since 1997 to disseminate academic research quickly and to stimulate discussion that can expand knowledge, instill optimal practice and build capacity in the public sector around the world to improve human well-being.
Our primary areas of interest are fiscal decentralization and local governance, tax policy, and public budgeting and fiscal management in the global context. Some papers may focus on the United States if the results have international relevance.
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