Global governance of Covid-19 and emergency actions by lowand middle-income countries

Abstract

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome called Covid-19 represents a dramatic social fact that has profoundly impacted institutions and populations around the world. It is a focusing event (Birkland, 1998; Kingdon, 2014) on a global scale, to which national governments have responded with emergency actions that show varying degrees of effectiveness and are contingent on scarce resources. In early 2020, the World Bank (WB) launched the Crisis Response Program (PRC), in force between April 2020 and June 2021. In order to receive the grant, countries needed to apply proposing a project aimed at emergency actions to tackle Covid-19. In this context, the article examines the influence of pre-existing state capacities as an explanatory factor for the odds of a country receiving a grant to carry out a cooperation project, using the annual average of approved projects as a proxy, from date of membership of the WB until 2019, and as control variables: location in the African region, existence of Covid-19 cases, global health security index and national per capita income. The logistic regression results showed that the chances of approval of a Covid-19 project by the World Bank increase the higher the annual average of projects previously approved by the financial institution and the country's per capita income. While the first finding confirms the central hypothesis, the second explains a positive causal relationship between the predictor and the dependent variable, differently than expected.

Keywords
Covid-19; global governance; external funding of public policies; World Bank; State capabilities