The diversity of local political agendas during COVID-19: A comparison of Mexican states.

COVID-19, as an event that disrupted economic activities around the world, affected government policy agendas. In Latin America, most of the responses were centralized by national governments;however, in Mexico, the 32 states developed their own economic policies in response to the pandemic. The Mexican case allows us to analyze recent hypotheses of comparative studies on this issue, which propose that the size of the population and the scale and socioeconomic structure of the administrations may be factors that explain the scope and diversity of local agendas. A quantitative methodology based on the estimation of Shannon's entropy index and non-parametric tests is used. Contrary to expectations, we find that the scope and diversity of the responses are not significantly related to the factors proposed in the literature. At least for the case of COVID-19 in the short run, the size and diversity of local agendas in Mexico seem to be based on institutional factors, such as information processing according to bounded rationality, incremental solutions, and the functional labeling of local governments. Thus, the variety of agendas is based on the direct interests of communities. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] La covid-19, en cuanto evento que interrumpió las actividades económicas en el mundo, afectó las agendas de las políticas gubernamentales. En Latinoamérica, la mayor parte de las respuestas fueron centralizadas por los Gobiernos nacionales, sin embargo, en México, las 32 entidades federativas desarrollaron políticas económicas propias frente a la pandemia. El caso mexicano nos permite analizar recientes hipótesis de los estudios comparados sobre esta temática en cuyas propuestas se plantea que el tamaño de la población y la escala y la estructura socioeconómica de las administraciones pueden ser factores que explican el alcance y la diversidad de las agendas locales. Se emplea una metodología cuantitativa con base en la estimación del índice de entropía de Shannon y la realización de pruebas no paramétricas. Contrario a lo esperado, encontramos que el alcance y la diversidad de las respuestas no se relaciona significativamente con los factores propuestos en la literatura. Al menos para el caso de la covid-19 en el corto plazo, el tamaño y la diversidad de las agendas locales en México parecen basarse en factores institucionales como el procesamiento de la información conforme a la racionalidad limitada, las soluciones incrementales y el etiquetado funcional de los Gobiernos locales. Así, la variedad de las agendas se sustenta en los intereses directos de las comunidades. (Spanish) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales is the property of FLACSO Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Pandemic Prevention: Lessons from COVID-19

DefinitionCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which appeared in late 2019, generating a pandemic crisis with high numbers of COVID-19-related infected individuals and deaths in manifold countries worldwide. Lessons learned from COVID-19 can be used to prevent pandemic threats by designing strategies to support different policy responses, not limited to the health system, directed to reduce the risks of the emergence of novel viral agents, the diffusion of infectious diseases and negative impact in society.

A cognitive participative decision-making model for transportation planning under different uncertainty levels

Decision-making processes related to transportation systems are often very complex, belonging to the class of “wicked problems” in social studies. The literature and the media abound in examples of transportation planning “failures” including decisions made, delayed or withdrawn without any traceable motivations, public opposition, public opposition, extra costs/implementation times and outright cancellation, wrong traffic/revenue forecasts. Planning failures stem from several causes, including technical errors in forecasting predictable effects, lack of consensus, new governance cycles and inability to recognize the intrinsic uncertainty affecting some key variables. The underlying assumption of this paper is that the quality of the decision-making process critically depends on how the process is structured and managed. The paper proposes a conceptual model to represent and organize transport planning as a cognitive decision-making process with strong involvement of different stakeholders in various stages, accounting for different levels of uncertainty and including short- and long-term decisions options. The result is a planning process that allows for changes in objectives, strategies and decisions during different stages of the process itself, as is usually the case when different governance and socio-economic cycles succeed over time. However, the process maintains a form of procedural consistency and is intended to counteract the “Penelope syndrome”, whereby decisions made under previous governance cycles are undone regardless of their merits and costs. The real-life implementation of the proposed model requires strong “political commitment” to an open and accountable decision-making process, a technical structure able to act as “process owner” coordinating technical and engagement activities, and a general societal attitude towards organized participation to public decision making. The proposed model was applied to the Regional Transportation Plan of Veneto in Italy where the above conditions applied. A number of lessons were learnt from that exercise: i) stakeholders’ engagement revealed an important potential to manage uncertainty and increase consensus;ii) flexibility and robustness with respect to medium–to–high uncertainty levels already recognized at the time of the plan (immediately before the COVID-19 crisis) were an appreciated feature of the plan;iii) separation between mature decisions and those needing further analysis was a success strategy, reducing political “decision costs” (from naysaying) by delaying decisions still recognizing underlying needs;iv) reduced decision time (a largely bi-partisan vote in less than one year).

Investors' reactions and firms' actions in the Covid-19 period: The case of Taiwan.

This study investigates the stock performance of industries in the panic, rebound, and post-V-shaped periods separated by Covid-19 events in Taiwan, in which industries are classified as the detrimental, impaired, neutral, and beneficial groups. Prices of these four industries slumped about the same in the panic period but subsequently rose differently in the rebound and post-V-shaped periods, implying that investors make investment decisions by perception when facing dread risk but by analytic assessments after dread risk recedes. Regression tests show that prices of individual stocks in the same industry dropped differently in the panic period, reflecting investors' bounded rationality in that they are emotional at the industry level but rational at the firm level. Also, logistic regressions indicate that investors tend to be overoptimistic about the impaired and detrimental industries in the rebound period. More than 10% of firms repurchased their stocks but only a small portion of firms issued equity in the Covid-19 period, revealing that firms would participate in short-run trading but halt long-run investments when facing uncertainty. This study contributes to the literature by showing investors' behavior and firms' actions in different periods of Covid-19.