RT Journal Article
T1 State capacity and the triple COVID-19 crises: an international comparison
A1 De La-Cruz Prego, Fernando
A1 Tezanos, Sergio
A1 Madrueño, Sergio
AB The COVID-19 multidimensional crisis poses a formidable challenge for human society as it is simultaneously and globally damaging the public health, the economic activity and the social wellbeing. The complexity and severity of this crisis has revealed the weaknesses and heterogeneities of States’ capacities to respond to the global pandemic. In this article, we raise the important question about which type of State capacity has been more effective for dealing with the negative effects of the pandemic. Our research proposes a hierarchical cluster analysis of countries that distinguishes three dimensions of the crisis (the health, the economic and the social crises) and measures both the States’ efforts (the ‘inputs’) for containing these crises, and the corresponding effects (the ‘outputs’) that result from the previous inputs. We classify 99 countries worldwide into four groups in 2020. Our results reveal that there is no simple ‘linear’ representation of the COVID-19 multi-crises in terms of State capacity (each cluster of countries has its own and specific State characteristics and crisis effects). We thus reject the hypothesis that strong State capacity was a sine qua non condition for tackling the negative effects of the COVID-19 multi-crises during the first phase of the pandemic. In the end, the global emergency has emphasized the need to rethink the research on State capacity as the previous theoreticalconstructions have been unable to explain the significative international differences in terms of the public performances in minimizing the negative effects of the pandemic.
PB Taylor y Francis Group
SN 0803-9410
YR 2022
FD 2022-05-18
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/130434
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/130434
LA eng
NO de la Cruz, F., Tezanos, S., & Madrueño, R. (2022). State Capacity and the Triple COVID-19 Crises: An International Comparison. Forum for Development Studies, 49(2), 129–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2022.2071334
DS Docta Complutense
RD 25 feb 2026