Public Opinion on European Health Policy, Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Often, global crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, bring to light crucial weaknesses in political, economic, social and health systems. First, there are governments who formulate and implement policies and, second, there are the citizens who support them, thus contributing a great deal to their success. Our paper investigates the European citizens' opinion on health policy, focusing on their preference for European health policy during the coronavirus pandemic. The paper uses bibliometric analysis, descriptive statistics, and logistic regression to discuss the public opinion on health policy, the factors of influence, the change in perspectives between 2020 and 2021, and the socio-demographic profile of those favorable for the development of a European health policy in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Our findings show that citizens from southern and central European countries are more likely to prioritize the development of a European health policy, as compared to Nordic countries. Between 2020 and 2021, pro-European health policy citizens profile changes and becomes clearer, from pensioners to young working age males with medium education. In general, people prioritizing a European health policy value health as the most important issue at a national level are generally satisfied with the European Union and do not trust their national government.

Interactions Between Policy Effects, Population Characteristics and the Tax-Benefit System: An Illustration Using Child Poverty and Child Related Policies in Romania and the Czech Republic.

We investigate the impact of the Romanian and Czech family policy systems on the poverty risk of families with children. We focus on separating out the effects of policy design itself and size of benefits from the interaction between policies and population characteristics. We find that interactions between population characteristics, the wider tax benefit system and child related policies are pervasive and large. Both population characteristics and the wider tax-benefit environment can dramatically alter the antipoverty effect of a given set of policies.