Assessing Policy Effectiveness and the Credit Implication Of Latin American Governments’ Response to Coronavirus Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is a once in a lifetime health and economic crisis that has revealed institutional weaknesses and put governments to the test. This study evaluated the effectiveness of governments’ policy responses and assessed if their performance aligns with Moody's Ratings for Institutional Strength. This paper situated each country in its pre-pandemic conditions defined by factors across health, economic and governance dimensions. The paper assessed whether or not each country’s pre-pandemic conditions align with its overall Health Outcomes score. The Health Outcomes score is based on the country’s performance across the following factors: total COVID-19 cases per million, total COVID-19 deaths per million, COVID-19 case growth rate, COVID-19 death rate, and COVID-19 reproduction rate.
While this paper suggested that initial health and economic conditions have low predictive power for public health success in the COVID-19 context, governance factors align more with country performance in the pandemic. Especially interesting and important factors include democratic quality, disinformation, messaging, social trust and leadership. This paper made the following recommendations based on its findings.
- Focus on the COVID-19 death rate and excess death as an indicator of virus severity.
- Explore the role of disinformation and social media to better understand countries’ Institutional Strength scores.
- Account for levels of social trust and democracy when working to predict the efficacy of policy responses.
This project illuminated democratic quality and disinformation as areas for further research. Future applications included predicting and assessing country resilience in the face of climate change impacts and climate disasters.