South Africa’s old hand at a new pandemic: politics dictates the quality of response

ABSTRACT

South Africa has been the worst hit by Covid-19 on the African continent and is experiencing devastating consequences. The goal of this study is to look at the role of underlying socio-economic factors and the quality of government policy responses in mitigating the impact of Covid-19 in South Africa against the backdrop of a multi-decade HIV epidemic. In the first phase of our analysis, we look at South Africa’s HIV experience. This analysis, using national level yearly data, shows that government capability plays an important role in mitigating the socio-economic consequences of the HIV epidemic. In the second phase of our analysis, we test whether a similar pattern, regarding the role of government capacity in containing the impact of Covid-19, holds true at the subnational level. The results show that rather than the level of income and wealth being the most decisive factors, the ability of the government to mobilize and influence the population’s behavior is key to mitigating the impact of Covid-19 pandemic. With the arrival of several vaccines around the globe, these findings regarding the centrality of government capacity at the national as well as the subnational level have important implications for addressing the Covid-19 pandemic and future disasters.

RÉSUMÉ

L'Afrique du Sud a été le pays le plus touché par le COVID-19 sur le continent africain, et elle en subit des conséquences dévastatrices. L'objectif de cette étude est d'examiner le rôle des facteurs socio-économiques sous-jacents et la qualité des réponses politiques du gouvernement dans l'atténuation de l'impact du COVID-19 en Afrique du Sud, dans le contexte d'une épidémie de VIH qui dure depuis plusieurs décennies. Dans la première phase de notre analyse, nous examinons l'expérience de l'Afrique du Sud en matière de VIH. Se basant sur des données annuelles au niveau national, cette analyse montre que la capacité du gouvernement joue un rôle important dans l'atténuation des conséquences socio-économiques de l'épidémie de VIH. Dans la deuxième phase de notre analyse, nous examinons si un schéma similaire concernant le rôle de la capacité du gouvernement à contenir l'impact du COVID-19, se vérifie au niveau infranational. Les résultats montrent que plutôt que le niveau de revenus et de richesses, en tant que facteurs les plus décisifs, c'est la capacité du gouvernement à mobiliser et à influencer le comportement de la population qui est essentielle à l'atténuation de l'impact de la pandémie de COVID-19. Avec l'arrivée de plusieurs vaccins dans le monde, ces résultats concernant la centralité de la capacité du gouvernement au niveau national ainsi qu'au niveau infranational, ont d'importantes implications pour faire face à la pandémie de COVID-19 et aux catastrophes futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• HIV
• political capacity
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The World Inequality Dataset came from Work Inequality Database (2021).

2 As a first step, we introduced a “naïve” estimate of a pooled OLS regression to test out the relationship between COVID-19 severity and independent variables. As expected, the OLS model did not estimate the time-invariant variables and did not capture the unobserved effects of the subnational units of South Africa. Therefore, we used the random effects model and generalized additive model for our analysis.

3 We use GAM with restricted maximum likelihood for smoothness selection to estimate our hypothesis due to the non-linear relationship between the severity and time variables.

4 As the model only captures the first wave, we also extended the timeline until May 2021. The results are constantly stable.

5 We opt for cumulative deaths over excess deaths because cumulative death is an official statistic that is readily available. Excess deaths would be a better choice if available weekly, but it is not calculated for shorter time periods in a timely manner. It would be worth exploring the difference between the two models in a subsequent study, once the excess deaths estimate becomes available.

6 The dashboard of provincial South Africa Covid-19 data came from Media Hack Collective (2021).

7 Our primary data source is The Department of Statistics – South Africa (2021b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayesha Umar Wahedi

Ayesha Umar Wahedi is an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University and a Fellow at TransResearch Consortium. Her research interests include economic and political reform in emerging financial markets, capital flows and international trade, multinational corporations and their role in development, and economic/financial networks of terrorism. In her research, she also collects and analyzes sub-national public finance data to calculate government political capacity for subnational governments. She has calculated measures of political capacity at the subnational level for Pakistan to study the impact of foreign aid on terrorism, the results of which are published in Will Foreign Aid Help Curb Terrorism in Pakistan? with M. Arbetman-Rabinowitz (2012). Her most recent research focus is on cyber-terrorism especially as critical services become digitized in the post-pandemic world, natural disasters and climate change.

Yuzhu Zeng

Yuzhu Zeng is a PhD student in Political Science at Claremont Graduate University and TransResearch Consortium (TRC) research Fellow. She is focusing on International Relations and Comparative Politics. Her research interests include political capacity of governments, relations between U.S. and China, impact of inequality in developing world, and demographic within a subnational framework. Her current research is provincial migration and political capacity in China. She obtained an MBA from University of La Verne and received her M.A in International Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

Marina Arbetman-Rabinowitz

Marina Arbetman Rabinowitz is a research professor at Claremont Graduate Institute- Maldonado Institute and Adjunct Professor at La Sierra University. She is also a TRC board member and works extensively with this research group. Publications pertinent to this issue include Political Capacity & Economic behavior M. Arbetman-Rabinowitz (1997), several chapters on political capacity the effects on policy in the Performance of Nations (2012) and in Conflict and Cooperation (2020) at the regional and subnational levels. Her research has focused on empirical measures of government capacity based on national and subnational fiscal models and the relation between the shadow economy and productivity on population mobilization. Other recurrent topics have been conflict and economic recovery from war, the importance of foreign aid on which she has published extensively. Her current research is moving towards natural disasters. Her expertise is in data analysis, measurement, policy/ program evaluation and quality control applied to business and development and has worked as a consultant for US Government, IMF, World Bank, AmeriCorps, State of New Mexico and private banks and financial institutions worldwide.