Latest: @LowyInstitute released their #COVID19 Performance Index today, assessing and ranking 98 countries' performance to deal with the #COVID19 outbreak. New Zealand, Vietnam and #Taiwan are the top three countries while the U.S., Brazil, Mexico and Colombia are ranked last. https://twitter.com/dw_chinese/status/1354645846059479048

More analysis from the team at @LowyInstitute: levels of economic development or differences in political systems between countries had less of an impact on outcomes than often assumed or publicized.

There may be some truth in the argument put forward by the American political scientist @FukuyamaFrancis that the dividing line in effective crisis response has not been regime type, “but whether citizens trust their leaders,...

... and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state”. In general, countries with smaller populations, cohesive societies, and capable institutions have a comparative advantage in dealing with a global crisis such as a pandemic.

Systemic factors alone — a society’s regional provenance, political system, economic development, or size — cannot account fully for the differences observed in global crisis responses. The results point to some of the strengths and vulnerabilities stemming from the way...

... different countries are set up to deal with a public policy challenge of this scale. But policy choices and political circumstances of the day appear to be just as important in shaping national responses to the pandemic.

Countries in the Asia–Pacific, on average, proved the most successful at containing the pandemic. By contrast, the rapid spread of COVID-19 along the main arteries of globalization quickly overwhelmed first Europe and then the US.

Europe also registered the greatest improvement over time of any region — with most countries there at one point exceeding the average performance of countries in the Asia–Pacific — before succumbing to a second, more severe, wave of the pandemic in the final months of 2020.

Synchronous lockdowns across the highly integrated European continent successfully quelled the first wave, but more open borders left countries vulnerable to renewed outbreaks in neighboring countries.

Meanwhile, the spread of the pandemic only accelerated in much of the Americas (North and South), making it the worst affected continent globally.

The tools to contain the spread of COVID-19 — stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, and border closures — have been common to most countries. But how governments convinced or compelled their citizens to adhere to these measures often reflected the nature of their political systems.

Despite initial differences, the performance of all regime types in managing the coronavirus converged over time. On average, countries with authoritarian models had no prolonged advantage in suppressing the virus.

Indeed, despite a difficult start and some notable exceptions, including the United States and the United Kingdom, democracies found marginally more success than other forms of government in their handling of the pandemic over the examined period.

By contrast, many hybrid regimes, such as Ukraine and Bolivia, appeared least able to meet the challenge.

At the outset of the global pandemic, there was little discernible difference in country performance by population size. However, experiences between large, medium, and small populations diverged markedly less than a month after countries recorded their hundredth COVID-19 case.

Smaller countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people consistently outperformed their larger counterparts throughout 2020, although this lead narrowed slightly towards the end of the examined period.

More surprising is that many developing countries were able to cope with the initial outbreak of the pandemic and that advanced economies, as a grouping, lost their lead by the end of 2020 —...

... with infections surging again in many places that had achieved apparent success in suppressing first waves of the pandemic.

Richer countries were quickly overwhelmed when the virus first emerged. International air travel accelerated virus transmission from abroad in these countries.

By contrast, many governments in developing countries had more lead time — and often a greater sense of urgency — to put in place preventative measures after the scale and severity of the global crisis became known.

The relatively ‘low-tech’ nature of the health measures used to mitigate the spread of the virus to date, including large-scale lockdowns, may have created a more level playing field between developed and developing countries in the management of COVID-19.

The uneven deployment of the first vaccines against COVID-19 could give richer countries a decisive upper hand in crisis recovery efforts, and leave poorer countries fighting against the pandemic for longer.