Bartolini, Stefano and Sarracino, Francesco and Slater, Giulia (2020): Do epidemics impose a trade-off between freedom and health? Evidence from Europe during Covid-19.
Preview |
PDF
MPRA_paper_105035.pdf Download (201kB) | Preview |
Abstract
The extent to which governments’ policies for the containment of Covid-19 relied on voluntary compliance or on enforced social and economic restrictions, differs substantially across countries. Why so? The answer to this question is important because economic and psychological costs of an epidemic surge with the severity of restrictions. As the risk of infections increased in recent decades, it is critical to understand what enables a society to contain epidemics with mild restrictions of citizens’ freedoms. Our answer is that trust in others and in public institutions allows for less stringent containment policies. We collected data on policy stringency, speed of decline of new contagions and mortality during the first wave of Covid-19 in Europe. After accounting for various confounding factors, we find that governments of more trustful countries introduced less stringent policies, burdening the society with lower economic and psychological costs. This did not come at the expense of public health: holding policy stringency constant, high trust countries report lower mortality, as well as lower number and faster decline of new contagions than others. We conclude that the trade-off between freedom and health during epidemics depends on a country’s trust level: the more people trust others and institutions, the more this trade-off fades. Therefore, promoting trust in others and in institutions is a critical challenge for contemporary societies.
Item Type: | MPRA Paper |
---|---|
Original Title: | Do epidemics impose a trade-off between freedom and health? Evidence from Europe during Covid-19. |
Language: | English |
Keywords: | Covid-19 Social capital Interpersonal trust Institutional trust Policy stringency Containment Freedom Collective action Social distancing Europe |
Subjects: | H - Public Economics > H1 - Structure and Scope of Government > H12 - Crisis Management I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I1 - Health > I18 - Government Policy ; Regulation ; Public Health Z - Other Special Topics > Z1 - Cultural Economics ; Economic Sociology ; Economic Anthropology > Z13 - Economic Sociology ; Economic Anthropology ; Social and Economic Stratification |
Item ID: | 105035 |
Depositing User: | giulia slater |
Date Deposited: | 31 Dec 2020 06:48 |
Last Modified: | 31 Dec 2020 06:48 |
References: | Aldridge, R. W., Lewer, D., Katikireddi, S. V., Mathur, R., Pathak, N., Burns, R., Fragaszy, E. B., Johnson, A. M., Devakumar, D., Abubakar, I. et al. (2020). Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in England are at increased risk of death from COVID-19: indirect standardisation of NHS mortality data. Wellcome Open Research, 5 , 88. Bargain, O., & Aminjonov, U. (2020). Trust and Compliance to Public Health Policies in Times of COVID-19 . Technical Report 13205 IZA Discussion Paper. Barrios, J. M., Benmelech, E., Hochberg, Y. V., Sapienza, P., & Zingales, L.(2020). Civic capital and social distancing during the covid-19 pandemic. Technical Report w27320 National Bureau of Economic Research. Bartscher, A. K., Seitz, S., Slotwinski, M., Siegloch, S., & Wehrhöfer, N.(2020). Social capital and the spread of Covid-19: Insights from European countries. Working Paper 8346 CESifo. Béraud, G., Kazmercziak, S., Beutels, P., Levy-Bruhl, D., Lenne, X., Mielcarek, N., Yazdanpanah, Y., Bo¨elle, P.-Y., Hens, N., & Dervaux, B. (2015). The French connection: the first large population-based contact survey in France relevant for the spread of infectious diseases. PloS one, 10 ,e0133203. Blair, R. A., Morse, B. S., & Tsai, L. L. (2017). Public health and public trust: Survey evidence from the Ebola Virus Disease epidemic in Liberia. Social Science & Medicine, 172 , 89–97. Borgonovi, F., & Andrieu, E. (2020). Bowling together by bowling alone: Social capital and covid-19. Covid Economics, 17, 73–96. Bowles, S., & Carlin, W. (2020). The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative. URL: https://voxeu.org/article/coming-battle-covid-19-narrative. Breusch, T. S., & Pagan, A. R. (1979). A simple test for heteroscedasticity and random coefficient variation. Econometrica, 47 , 1287–1294. Chen, T., Wu, D., Chen, H., Yan, W., Yang, D., Chen, G., Ma, K., Xu, D., Yu, H., Wang, H. et al. (2020). Clinical characteristics of 113 deceased patients with coronavirus disease 2019: retrospective study. Bmj , 368 . Chuang, Y.-C., Huang, Y.-L., Tseng, K.-C., Yen, C.-H., & Yang, L.-h. (2015). Social capital and health-protective behavior intentions in an influenza pandemic. PloS one, 10 , e0122970. Di Gialleonardo, L., Marè, M., Motroni, A., & Porcelli, F. (2020). Family Ties and the Pandemic: Some Evidence from Sars-CoV-2 . working paper 3737502 SSRN. Dobson, A. P., Pimm, S. L., Hannah, L., Kaufman, L., Ahumada, J. A., Ando, A. W., Bernstein, A., Busch, J., Daszak, P., Engelmann, J. et al. (2020). Ecology and economics for pandemic prevention. Science, 369 , 379–381. Dong, L., & Bouey, J. (2020). Public mental health crisis during covid-19 pandemic, China. Emerg Infect Dis, 26 , 10-3201. Durante, R., Guiso, L., & Gulino, G. (2020). Civic capital and social distancing: evidence from Italians’ response to COVID-19. VoxEU Column Finch, W. H., & Hernández Finch, M. E. (2020). Poverty and Covid-19: rates of incidence and deaths in the United States during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic. Frontiers in Sociology, 5 , 47. Fiorillo, A., Sampogna, G., Giallonardo, V., Del Vecchio, V., Luciano, M., Albert, U., Carmassi, C., Carr`a, G., Cirulli, F., Dell’Osso, B. et al. (2020). Effects of the lockdown on the mental health of the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy: Results from the COMET collaborative network. European Psychiatry, 63 . Fischbacher, U., Gächter, S., & Fehr, E. (2001). Are people conditionally cooperative? Evidence from a public goods experiment. Economics letters, 71 , 397–404. Fraser, T., & Aldrich, D. P. (2020). Social ties, mobility, and covid-19 spread in Japan. Research Square. Frey, C. B., Chen, C., & Presidente, G. (2020). Democracy, culture, and contagion: Political regimes and countries responsiveness to Covid-19. Covid Economics, 18 , 1–20. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity volume 99. Free press New York. Fumanelli, L., Ajelli, M., Manfredi, P., Vespignani, A., & Merler, S. (2012). Inferring the structure of social contacts from demographic data in the analysis of infectious diseases spread. PLoS Computational Biology, 8 , e1002673. Gollwitzer, A., Martel, C., Brady, W. J., Pärnamets, P., Freedman, I. G., Knowles, E. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2020). Partisan differences in physical distancing are linked to health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behaviour , (pp. 1–12). Hale, T., Petherick, A., Phillips, T., & Webster, S. (2020). Variation in government responses to COVID-19. Blavatnik school of government working paper , 31 . Harari, Y. (2020). The world after Coronavirus. Financial Times, . Jordan, R. E., Adab, P., & Cheng, K. (2020). Covid-19: risk factors for severe disease and death. Kim, H. H.-s., & Jung, J. H. (2020). Social isolation and psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-national analysis. The Gerontologist , . Kirby, T. (2020). Evidence mounts on the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on ethnic minorities. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 8 , 547–548. Leung, K., Jit, M., Lau, E. H., & Wu, J. T. (2017). Social contact patterns relevant to the spread of respiratory infectious diseases in Hong Kong. Nature Scientific reports, 7 . Li, Q., Guan, X., Wu, P., Wang, X., Zhou, L., Tong, Y., Ren, R., Leung, K. S., Lau, E. H., Wong, J. Y. et al. (2020). Early transmission dynamics in wuhan, china, of novel coronavirus–infected pneumonia. New England Journal of Medicine, 382 , 1199–1207. Mossong, J., Hens, N., Jit, M., Beutels, P., Auranen, K., Mikolajczyk, R., Massari, M., Salmaso, S., Tomba, G. S., Wallinga, J. et al. (2008). Social contacts and mixing patterns relevant to the spread of infectious diseases. PLoS Med, 5 , e74. Ostrom, E. (1991). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. New York: Cambridge university press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster. Rajkumar, R. P. (2020). COVID-19 and mental health: A review of the existing literature. Asian journal of psychiatry, (p. 102066). Rhodes, A., Ferdinande, P., Flaatten, H., Guidet, B., Metnitz, P. G., & Moreno, R. P. (2012). The variability of critical care bed numbers in Europe. Intensive care medicine, 38 , 1647–1653. Rönnerstrand, B. (2014). Social capital and immunization against the 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic in the American States. Public Health, 128 , 709–715. Rossi, R., Socci, V., Talevi, D., Mensi, S., Niolu, C., Pacitti, F., Di Marco, A., Rossi, A., Siracusano, A., & Di Lorenzo, G. (2020). COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures impact on mental health among the general population in Italy. Frontiers in psychiatry, 11 , 790. Schmeltz, K. (2020). Enforcement may crowd out voluntary support for Covid19 policies, especially where trust in government is weak and in a liberal society. University of Konstanz. Scrivens, K., & Smith, C. (2013). Four interpretations of social capital: An agenda for measurement . OECD Statistics Working Papers 06 OECD. Shinada, M., & Yamagishi, T. (2007). Punishing free riders: direct and indirect promotion of cooperation. Evolution and Human Behavior , 28 , 330–339. Smith, K. F., Goldberg, M., Rosenthal, S., Carlson, L., Chen, J., Chen, C., & Ramachandran, S. (2014). Global rise in human infectious disease outbreaks. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 11 , 20140950. Soroka, S., Helliwell, J. F., & Johnston, R. (2003). Measuring and modelling trust. In F. Kay, & R. Johnston (Eds.), Diversity, social capital and the welfare state (pp. 279–303). Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Varshney, L. R., & Socher, R. (2020). COVID-19 growth rate decreases with social capital. medRxiv, . Vinck, P., Pham, P. N., Bindu, K. K., Bedford, J., & Nilles, E. J. (2019). Institutional trust and misinformation in the response to the 2018–19 Ebola outbreak in North Kivu, DR Congo: a population-based survey. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 19 , 529–536. Zhang, J., Klepac, P., Read, J. M., Rosello, A., Wang, X., Lai, S., Li, M., Song, Y., Wei, Q., Jiang, H. et al. (2019). Patterns of human social contact and contact with animals in Shanghai, China. Nature Scientific reports, 9 . Zhou, F., Yu, T., Du, R., Fan, G., Liu, Y., Liu, Z., Xiang, J., Wang, Y., Song, B., Gu, X. et al. (2020). Clinical course and risk factors for mortality of adult inpatients with covid-19 in Wuhan, China: a retrospective cohort study. The lancet , 395 , 1054–1062. |
URI: | https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/id/eprint/105035 |