ABSTRACT
Fiscal responses to the COVID-19 crisis have varied a lot across countries. Using a panel of 127 countries over two separate subperiods between 2020 and 2021, this paper seeks to determine the extent that fiscal responses contributed to the spread and containment of the disease. The study first documents that rich countries, which had the largest total and health-related fiscal responses, achieved the lowest fatality rates, defined as the ratio of COVID-related deaths to cases, despite having the largest recorded numbers of cases and fatalities. The next most successful were less developed economies, whose smaller total fiscal responses included a larger health-related component than emerging market economies. The study used a promising big data analytics technology, the random forest algorithm, to determine which factors explained a country's fatality rate. The findings indicate that a country's fatality ratio over the next period can be almost entirely predicted by its economic development level, fiscal expenditure (both total and health-related), and initial fatality ratio. Finally, the study conducted a counterfactual exercise to show that, had less developed economies implemented the same fiscal responses as the rich (as a share of GDP), then their fatality ratios would have declined by 20.47% over the first period and 2.59% over the second one.
ABSTRACT
We used big data analytics for exploring the relationship between government response policies, human mobility trends and numbers of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases comparatively in Poland, Turkey and South Korea. We collected daily mobility data of retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas. For quantifying the actions taken by governments and making a fairness comparison between these countries, we used stringency index values measured with the 'Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker'. For the Turkey case, we also developed a model by implementing the multilayer perceptron algorithm for predicting numbers of cases based on the mobility data. We finally created scenarios based on the descriptive statistics of the mobility data of these countries and generated predictions on the numbers of cases by using the developed model. Based on the descriptive analysis, we pointed out that while Poland and Turkey had relatively closer values and distributions on the study variables, South Korea had more stable data compared to Poland and Turkey. We mainly showed that while the stringency index of the current day was associated with mobility data of the same day, the current day's mobility was associated with the numbers of cases 1 month later. By obtaining 89.3% prediction accuracy, we also concluded that the use of mobility data and implementation of big data analytics technique may enable decision-making in managing uncertain environments created by outbreak situations. We finally proposed implications for policymakers for deciding on the targeted levels of mobility to maintain numbers of cases in a manageable range based on the results of created scenarios.
