Short-Term Health Policy Responses to Crisis and Uncertainty

Abstract

The onset of the economic crisis more than a decade ago posed extreme challenges to health care systems that may now be repeated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting policies produced a wide range of (in some cases, even opposite) outcomes: increased or decreased public expenditures for health care. Curiously, however, countries that were considered particularly hard hit by the economic crisis showed different extremes of policy outcomes. Investigating these developments requires a dynamic view and identifying explanations for government action in one direction or the other. Using the lenses of several theoretical perspectives in public policy research, this article analyses the conditions under which public health expenditures changed in European Union member states after the financial crisis. Why did certain countries, at first sight similarly affected, show opposite outcomes? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) confirms that left-wing governments and coordinated market economies, in combination and alone, tended to increase public health expenditures in the short term, whereas countries where neither of these conditions was present decreased public health expenditures.

Social Policy Responses to Covid-19 in the Global South: Evidence from 36 Countries

“…To begin with, high fiscal capacity seems to have been an important precondition of strong social policy responses (Woo, 2020). On average, left-wing governments appear to have supported more generous social policy responses (Blofield and Pribble, 2021;Hornung and Bandelow, 2022), although the cases of Brazil and Mexico show that the effects of partisan ideology are complex and not always straightforward (Lustig and Trasberg, 2021). In contrast, political institutions with more 'veto points' seem to have inhibited quick and effective social policy responses (Rocco et al, 2020;Béland et al, 2021b;Ramia and Perrone, 2021).…”

The non-use of evidence in the adoption of a sugar-sweetened beverage tax in OECD countries

“…The method has proven its ability to generate insightful results in comparative analyses of policy adoption. 23 , 24 …”

Is the economic uncertainty– human health relationship nonlinear? An empirical analysis for the China

“…Moreover, a reduction in government revenue tends to reduce government health expenditures that result in the deterioration of human health in developing economies. Hornung & Bandelow [50] also reported that economic uncertainty tends to increase unemployment which leads to a reduction in per capita health expenditure. Studies highlighted that people in developing economies are expected to be influenced by fear of losing a job, insecurity, reduction in income, social…”