Inequality and Support for Government Responses to COVID-19

Hai-Anh Dang (), Edmund Malesky () and Cuong Nguyen
Additional contact information
Edmund Malesky: Duke University

No 13816, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Despite a rich literature studying the impact of inequality on policy outcomes, there has been limited effort to bring these insights into the debates about comparative support for government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We fill in this gap by analyzing rich survey data from six countries spanning different income levels and geographical locations  China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that poorer individuals are less supportive of government responses, and that poorest individuals are least supportive. Furthermore, poorer individuals residing in more economically unequal countries offer even less government support. We also find that both economic and non-economic factors could affect the poor's decisions to support stringent government policies. These findings suggest that greater transfers to the poor may ameliorate their resistance, increase support for strict policies, and may reduce the potential deepening of social inequalities caused by the pandemic.

Keywords: poverty; inequality; income quintiles; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D0 H0 I3 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: PLoS ONE, 2022, 17 (9), e0272972.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13816.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality and Support for Government Responses to COVID-19 (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13816

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().