Simanti Bandyopadhyay, Sujana Kabiraj, and Subrata Majumder recently released “Performances in COVID-19 Management Across Countries: Do Subnational Finances Matter?” In it, they investigate the efficiency of COVID management using state-level data from three of the worst affected countries, USA, India, and Mexico, in three time periods in the pre-vaccine phase. Next, they explore the extent to which state government financial, sociodemographic, and governance indicators can explain the difference in efficiency, considering both state governments in the study countries together and separately. Overall, grand efficiency continuously increased from August to November 2020. The grand efficiency scores of Mexico and the USA gradually increased on 3rd October and 29th November 2020. The results reflect that the USA was holding the leading position in terms of COVID-19 pandemic management at that time. The second analytical stage uses an exploratory median analysis to investigate the impact of different indicators on efficiency. State finance variables are positively associated with the grand efficiency score for all three time periods, while the association is negative for the expenditures to own revenue ratio and expenditures to total revenue ratios, debt ratios with respect to different fiscal indicators, and percentage of health expenditure over total expenditures and GSDP. These patterns are less consistent among countries when we look at group efficiency over time. They find a positive association of per capita total revenue with group efficiency scores for all countries over all time periods.
Read the full working paper here.
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