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Curse of Democracy: Evidence from 2020

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Abstract

Countries with more democratic political regimes experienced greater GDP loss and more deaths from Covid-19 in 2020. Using five different instrumental variable strategies, we find that democracy is a major cause of the wealth and health losses. This impact is global and is not driven by China and the US alone. A key channel for democracy's negative impact is weaker and narrower containment policies at the beginning of the outbreak, not the speed of introducing policies.

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  • Yusuke Narita & Ayumi Sudo, 2021. "Curse of Democracy: Evidence from 2020," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 2281, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2281
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    Cited by:

    1. Bessho, S., 2023. "Elections and COVID-19 benefit payments," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    2. Badi H. Baltagi & Ying Deng & Jing Li & Zhenlin Yang, 2023. "Cities in a pandemic: Evidence from China," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(2), pages 379-408, March.
    3. Ryan P. Badman & Yunxin Wu & Keigo Inukai & Rei Akaishi, 2021. "Blessing or Curse of Democracy?: Current Evidence from the Covid-19 Pandemic," Papers 2105.10865, arXiv.org.
    4. Yuyang He & Dominik Naeher, 2022. "Do democracies perform worse during pandemics? Evidence from 2020," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 42(3), pages 1681-1687.

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    Keywords

    Democracy; Economic Growth; Public Health; Pandemic; Instrumental Variables;
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