Research Question, Argument and Contents

We analyze the impact of the severity of the key anti-Covid 19 measures, in particular school closures, contact bans, on select public health outcomes and on the economic situation.

Using key statistical indicators such as mortality rates, incidence rates, vaccination rates and GDP we have monitored since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 until 2023, we started by comparing data from 30 European countries.

Meanwhile, we have expanded our analysis to include five Eastern European countries, including Ukraine. Finally, we focused on ten countries distinct in terms of their respective anti-Covid 19 strategies and, in particular, the severity of the measures adopted anti-Covid-19 strategies, such as Sweden and Italy. By monitoring the development from 2020 to 2023 and comparing the data with the previous three-year period (2016-2019) across our country sample, we assess/evaluate the effectiveness of their anti-Covid-19 policies.

As our analysis shows, a clear distinction must be made between short- and long-term effects. In addition to this, we found a significant correlation between the harshness and duration of the country-specific anti-Covid-19 measures and their impact.

The research design including methods and empirical material

Our principal data source, e.g. on mortality, was EUROSTAT. In addition, we used official data from the national statistical authorities in our country sample. Another primary data source in our analysis is Oxford University’s database "Our World in Data". This includes the "Oxford Stringency Index" (a composite measure of nine response metrics such as school closures; workplace closures; etc.) , which has been continuously calculated since the onset of the pandemic for numerous countries worldwide. Eventually, we complemented our study with socio-economic data from municipalities and scientific studies with relevance to our analysis such as the OECD study “What is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrants and their children?”.

As our research we selected descriptive and inferential statistics (correlation, regression). Additionally, we examined media coverage (in Germany) in parallel with the development of the pandemic.

Here is an example (Sweden): Comparison of excess mortality 2020-2023 with average (Ø) 2016-2019 & regression trend-line

For the period 2020-2023, excess mortality for Sweden is +3%. The trend line shows that mortality in Sweden is decreasing, the population is getting older again.

This figure shows the data for Sweden extended by the Oxford Stringency Index (OSI) and the vaccination rate.

In other countries this is different, as our paper will show ...

Name, affiliation, and contact information of the author(s)

Dr. Kai Masser & Hannes Merz, German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, Chair of Economics: Economic and Transport Policy, (https://www.uni-speyer.de/lehrstuehle/level-2/prof-dr-dr-hc-andreas-knorr/mitarbeiter/innen).

Dr Kai Masser is a member of the German Section of IIAS

Mail: kmasser@uni-speyer.de

Phone: +49.6232.654.351

Hannes Merz

Mail: hannes.merz@uni-speyer.de

Phone: +49.6232.654.408

The beginning of the year 2020 will be remembered by the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and governments worldwide consequent responses, in order to decelerate the disease expansion and its effects. During that time, health professionals had recommended social distancing strategies and the use of protective masks. At the same time, researchers all over the world had studied the virus looking for effective vaccines to protect population, as well as for promising medicine treatments.

The crises scenario had forced the paralysis of different economic sectors and required new solutions for social interaction, for instance: remote workplaces, online classes, food delivery, and others. Similarly, the execution of public policies had also been affected, demanding of the government a response that would adequate policies outcomes to allow the continuation of public policies deliverance. It also reached the public policies implemented by third sector actors through terms of social partnerships and management contracts in Minas Gerais.

In March 2020 the Minas Gerais state had three (3) public policies executed through management contracts, which were: the management of the Philharmonic Orchestra Of Minas Gerais, the management of the artistic program of the Arts Palace, in the city of Belo Horizonte, and the execution of the State Policy for Crime Prevention. There were also two (2) public policies executed through partnership terms, and they were: the management of the visits program in the Liberty Palace and Boa Esperança Farm and the Minas Gerais School Games Policy. In addition, we identify one (2) public process to select third sector institutions to establish a partnership term or a management contract to continue executing two of the existing policies.

This article’s objective is to understand “how the covid-19 affected the public policies held by third sector actors through terms of social partnerships and management contracts in Minas Gerais and what changes were therefore implemented in those policies outcomes”?

In order to accomplish the objective, we propose a qualitative and descriptive multiple case study. For data collection, we propose document analysis, to study the policies partnerships and contracts documentation, their reports of results and evaluation, as well as the processes documents to adequate the public policies outcomes to the limitations of pandemic context. The documents will be analyzed through the content analysis technique, described by Bardin. For this, we will describe the main outcomes planned for each policy, before and after the Covid-19 pandemic, and the new outcomes that were maintained after 2020. We will also analyze reports of results and evaluation of each policy to review the results described in the documents.

This contribution addresses the question of how the governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been evaluated in the wake of the crisis. Much has been said on crisis management, and scholars have devoted considerable attention to assessing the performance of governments in navigating the crisis, be it through qualitative or quantitative methods and single case studies or comparative analyses. In this contribution, we offer to dissociate from crisis management assessments and adopt a meta-perspective on the way political-administrative authorities have themselves evaluated their own reaction to the crisis. In fact, as is often the case in crisis situations, the pandemic has given way to a bustling evaluation activity, with the proliferation of commissioned evaluations by various agencies and governments (both at the local and national levels). It has been largely recognized that crisis management per se has excessively focused on the bio-medical dimensions of pandemic containment (i.e., minimizing the number of contaminations and deaths) at the detriment of other longer term social and health consequences regarding the effects of anti-COVID-19 measures (e.g., mental health, social inequalities in education). However, little is still known about the standards through which governments have decided to evaluate their response to the crisis, in particular whether those larger and longer-term effects have been part of the reflection or whether commissioned evaluations have focused on the major health and economic indicators. In an era of poly-crisis, this question is crucial, as governments will have to take stock of the management of this major disruptive event to prepare for the next crises.

Prominent evaluation authors such as Michael Quinn Patton have warned that in the face of humanity-threatening crises, a renewed reflection on how to assess success and failure is more than ever on the agenda: "the greatest danger for evaluators in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s criteria" (2021). In this paper, we propose a comprehensive analysis of the evaluations commissioned by public agencies and political offices to measure the success of their crisis management. We compare the Swiss and French cases, as the two governments have had a different approach to the strictness of their containment measures, with a strong law and order approach in France and a largely voluntary-based semi-lockdown in Switzerland. We analyze what evaluation questions and criteria were at the heart of the countries' evaluations (both self-evaluations and externally mandated evaluations) to understand what dimensions of their crisis management strategies were prioritized. Methodologically, the analysis is based on a qualitative content analysis of evaluation reports used as sources. For both countries, the results are put in perspective with the domestic political games and official declarations on pandemic management, based on secondary literature. This paper thus proposes a contribution to the crisis management literature through the lens and contribution of policy evaluation.

Reference:

Patton, M. Q. (2021). Evaluation Criteria for Evaluating Transformation: Implications for the Coronavirus Pandemic and the Global Climate Emergency. American Journal of Evaluation, 42(1), 53–89.

Despite notable governance imperfections in its reforms during 1980s and early 1990s, China’s healthcare system since then has been considered a prime example of success in adapting to the needs of the country’s socioeconomic transformation. Notwithstanding this achievement, healthcare coverage and utilisation for migrant workers remains lagging behind in terms of its adequacy, generosity and portability, making it one of the weakest links or “Achille’s Heels” on China’s quest to universal health coverage (UHC). It was only since the 2010s that the laggard and marginalised healthcare for migrant workers began to improve, which is remarkable when considering the substantial improvement achieved in a very short time span. How can this unusual turnaround be explained which marks a sharp deviation from the previous record? To answer this question well, it is imperative to first understand why healthcare coverage and delivery for migrant workers in China was so poor in the two decades before that.

Applying the multi-dimensional and nested conception of policy capacity (Wu et al. 2015) as our analytical lens and drawing on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources, including interviews with key stakeholders, official policy documents and so forth, we demonstrate that while China’s health system possessed a high level of capacity overall, its pursuit of UHC was variously undermined by inadequate stock of analytical, operational and political capacity. How these capacity gaps were closed through subsequent policies and initiatives, accordingly, becomes the key to understand the recent improvement in welfare expansion for migrant workers.

Taken together, our findings both show how capacity deficits can lead to suboptimal policy outcomes and highlight how such deficits can be mitigated to achieve systemic improvement. By elucidating the evolution of the system from a low level of capacity for delivering healthcare for migrant workers to a high level, this research also sheds timely lights on the temporal dynamics of capacity which, to date, remains a gap to be aptly filled in the policy design literature. Lastly, UHC is widely acknowledged as being both an overarching social policy goal and ongoing challenge in many emerging economies given their large informal sector, limited investment and supply-side constraints in the health policy sector. As such, how China has strengthened its policy capacity for attaining UHC and tackling the challenges along the way over time would offer valuable lessons and inspirations beyond its own context.