Variation in government responses to COVID-19

Working paper

COVID-19 has prompted a wide range of responses from governments around the world. There is a pressing need for up-to-date policy information as these responses proliferate, and governments weigh decisions about the stringency of their policies against other concerns. We introduce the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), providing a systematic way to track government responses to COVID-19 across countries and time. We combine this data into a series of novel indices that aggregate various measures of government responses. These indices are used to describe variation in government responses, explore whether the government response affects the rate of infection, and identify correlates of more or less intense responses.

Authors: Hale, T; Angrist, N; Kira, B; Petherick, A; Phillips, T

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford
• Publication date: 2020-05-27
• Commissioning body: Blavatnik School of Government
• Paper number: BSG-WP-2020/032
• Language: English
• Keywords: SBTMR