IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-22-00200.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do democracies perform worse during pandemics? Evidence from 2020

Author

Listed:
  • Yuyang He

    (University College Dublin)

  • Dominik Naeher

    (University of Goettingen)

Abstract

Existing evidence in the emerging literature studying the performance of different political regimes in handling the Covid-19 pandemic is mixed and inconclusive. This paper contributes new insights by using a country-level difference-in-differences estimation strategy to study the effects of democracy on different socio-economic outcomes during the first year of the pandemic. We find that democracies suffered stronger reductions in GDP growth rates and larger increases in unemployment rates than autocracies. However, the better performance of autocracies in these economic indicators does not seem to translate into higher levels of citizens' self-reported happiness. Unlike previous studies, we find that both types of political regimes featured similar increases in mortality rates, on average, in 2020.

Suggested Citation

  • Yuyang He & Dominik Naeher, 2022. "Do democracies perform worse during pandemics? Evidence from 2020," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 42(3), pages 1681-1687.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-22-00200
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2022/Volume42/EB-22-V42-I3-P140.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Democracy; Public health; Covid-19; Pandemic; Difference-in-differences estimation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • P4 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Other Economic Systems

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-22-00200. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.