The Efficiency of Nations in the Struggle Against the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This chapter aims to investigate the efficiency of nations in their struggle against the COVID-19 analysing data from June and December 2020 with a novel three-stage methodology. In the first stage, 107 nations were clustered into highly competitive, competitive, and non-competitive countries using their Global Competitiveness Index scores (World Economic Forum) to evaluate comparable countries in the second stage with the Data Envelopment Analysis. In the third stage, the relationship between countries' efficiency and performance in 66 variables published in the United Nations Human Development Report was investigated along with the long-debated aspect of a nation's political governance regime using Tobit regression. The worst performing highly competitive nations were USA and UK, competitive nations were Chile and Peru, and non-competitive nations were Brazil and Mozambique. Air pollution, international inbound tourists, urban population significantly reduced while domestic credit and gross national income per capita significantly increased efficiency, but the political regime did not affect it.