Political economy of state capacity meets COVID-19

Why are some countries affected by COVID-19 more than the others? While we still need more data to fully comprehend the effects and the distribution of the COVID-19 cases, initial analyses suggest some countries have been hit much harder, such as Western Europe and the United States, particularly in comparison to their neighbours, Eastern Europe and Canada. Abundant literature suggests that health outcomes related to diseases, such as prevalence and the death rates, can be explained by state capacity, level of economic development, regime type and policies adopted. It is well documented that richer countries with better administrative capacity, health care, and less corruption tend to do better in preventing and curing disease then their less able and wealthy counterparts. Similarly, after controlling for economic development, democracies tend to outperform autocracies in caring for the most vulnerable parts of their population. Policies adopted to fight diseases are also considered important, but it is often difficult to disentangle their effect from the role of the state capacity and economic development. However, based on the results of basic descriptive analyses, we see that poor countries, with weaker state capacity have lower COVID-19 disease prevalence and lower mortality rates. We attempt to separate the effect of policies adopted to prevent spreading the disease and research to which extent standard explanations from the developmental literature help us clarify surprising distribution of COVID-19 infections and deaths. For data on policy response, we rely on the Coronavirus Government Response Tracker data. Our paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of COVID-19 pandemic using the well-known political economy concepts and tools.