Government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in eastern and Western Europe: the role of health, political and economic factors

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the role of health, political and economic factors in governments' responses to COVID-19 pandemic in Eastern and Western Europe. It relies on survival analysis to test differences in timing of lockdowns and mixed effects models to unpack the determinants of the severity of restrictions. The results show that responses were correlated with health system capacities during the first wave, with Eastern European countries introducing restrictions early in epidemiological terms. As political and economic considerations took primacy in governments' responses, the socio-economically weaker countries in the East relaxed their restrictions sooner and were less likely to re-impose them compared to the West.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• government responses
• Eastern Europe
• Western Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, for example, initially downplayed the risks of the pandemics considering the lockdown policies to be out of the question (Boin and Lodge 2021). In Italy, the government also downplayed the risk of the virus (see Capano 2020), but this can be attributed to the fact that Italy was the first European country to register COVID-19 infections.

2 The following countries were categorized as NHS: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, United Kingdom, Norway, Ireland, Malta, following Immergut et al. (2021).

3 We use a 3-month lag (1 quarter) for GDP and unemployment changes compared to the same period in the previous year. This allows us to avoid inverse causality, since lockdown measures have an impact on GDP. It is also more reasonable to assume that policymakers look at the most recent data available to them (latest quarter) when considering policy trade-offs. Quarterly GDP change and unemployment are not present in the static tables since they are quarterly changes.

4 EU countries: Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Cyprus.

5 Among countries with presidential or semi-presidential regimes, only Portugal and Poland experienced presidential elections. The presidential elections in Greece were not consider since the Greek president is elected by parliament and has only a ceremonial role. Likewise, the Icelandic presidential elections were also not considered because of the limited, ceremonial, role of the president.

6 February to August 2020 for the first wave, and August 2020 to February 2021 for the second wave. This creates two equal periods in terms of time. We stop the analysis at the beginning of February 2020 since that is the time that countries started their mass vaccination campaigns, which likely changed the calculus for policymakers.

7 We considered that a lockdown will be felt as severe by the population both in cases where there are many different restrictions (an above-average overall stringency score) and in cases where freedom of movement is curtailed (a high score on the stay-at-home orders sub indicator). A severe lockdown was therefore defined as either exceeding 60 on the stringency index or scoring at least 2 out 3 on the indicator for stay-at-home orders from OxCGRT. We considered the former to be a reasonable cut-off point for the stringency index, given its range (0 to 100), it’s mean in February 2020 (10.7) compared to March 2020 (75.6) and August 2020 (45) compared with November 2020 (65). Other cut-off points did not change the dates meaningfully, since a score of 60 is quickly preceded or followed by stay-at-home orders. The latter indicator takes value 2 or higher when individuals are not allowed to leave their homes, apart from exceptional circumstances.

8 A country was censured if it had not imposed a lockdown by 01.02.2021. Censured cases are marked by crosses in Figure 2.

9 See model 5 in Table 3, which allows for the effect of testing to vary within countries, across time. For the other models, testing was used only as a control variable, as a fixed effect.

10 Eastern Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

11 Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

12 Eastern Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

13 Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.