Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catastrophic event that has seriously endangered the world’s population. Governments have largely been unprepared to deal with such an unprecedented calamity, partially due to the lack of sufcient or adequately fne-grained data necessary for forecasting the pandemic’s evolution. To fll this gap, researchers worldwide have been collecting data about diferent aspects of COVID-19’s evolution and government responses to them so as to provide the foundation for informative models and tools that can be used to mitigate the current pandemic and possibly prevent future ones. Indeed, since the early stages of the pandemic, a number of research initiatives were launched with this goal, including the PERISCOPE (Pan-European Response to the ImpactS of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics) Project, funded by the European Commission. PERISCOPE aims to investigate the broad socio-economic and behavioral impacts of the COVID19 pandemic, with the goal of making Europe more resilient and prepared for future large-scale risks. The purpose of this study, carried out as part of the PERISCOPE project, is to provide a frst European-level analysis of the efect of government policies on the spread of the virus. To do so, we assessed the relationship between a novel index, the Policy Intensity Index, and four epidemiological variables collected by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and then applied a comprehensive Pan-European population model based on Multilevel Vector Autoregression. This model aims at identifying efects that are common to some European countries while treating country-specifc policies as covariates, explaining the diferent evolution of the pandemic in nine selected countries due to data availability: Spain, France, Netherlands, Latvia, Slovenia, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Estonia. Results show that specifc policies’ efectiveness tend to vary consistently within the diferent countries, although in general policies related to Health Monitoring and Health Resources are the most efective for all countries.

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