Fighting Against COVID-19: The Role of Consolidated Fiscal Policies and Transparency in Data Sharing

Abstract

With COVID-19 the importance of integrity and transparency in health systems was once again highlighted all over the world. All countries took many fiscal and non-fiscal precautions to fight against this pandemic trying to protect the functionality of health systems and to minimize the damage to the public by keeping the spread of the pandemic under control. In addition to non-fiscal responses like curfews travel bans social distance closure of public areas isolation etc. countries also made fiscal responses by allocating budgets only to combat the pandemic. Fiscal responses were also split into two categories: the entire budget allocated for the fight against the pandemic and the budget allocated only to health issues. The budgets under both categories were announced by many counties at the beginning of each quarter starting from October 2020 January 2021 and April 2021. However from the global context it was observed that there were very serious differences between the fiscal responses namely financial support provided by the countries. Also while some countries did not share any data in this area it was also observed that some of the other countries did not take any fiscal responses. In this study which will be developed by examining the data of many countries in depth and comparatively we aim to analyze the success of countries that share their data in a transparent regular way in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. This study highlights not only the consolidated fiscal policies but also the integrity and transparency in data sharing policies of health systems to fight with this pandemic and to decrease the possible risk in economies arising from this pandemic in the long run. © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.