Early COVID-19 Government Communication Is Associated With Reduced Interest in the QAnon Conspiracy Theory.

Does inadequate risk communication during uncertain times trigger the rise of conspiratorial ideas? We hypothesize that, where government COVID-19 risk communication started early, as measured by the number of days between the start of the communication campaign and the first case in the country, citizens are less likely to turn to conspiratorial explanations for the pandemic, which typically assign blame to powerful actors with secret interests. In Study 1a, we find strong support for our hypothesis in a global sample of 111 countries, using daily Google search volumes for QAnon as a measure of interest in QAnon, which is a conspiracy theory contending, among other things, that COVID-19 is a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful actors and aimed at repressing civil liberties. The effect is robust to a variety of sensitivity checks. In Study 1b, we show that the effect is not explainable by pre-pandemic cross-country differences in QAnon interest, nor by 'secular' rising interest in QAnon amid the pandemic. A one-standard deviation (26.2days) increase in communication lateness is associated with a 26% increase in QAnon interest. In pre-registered Study 2, we find limited support for the proposition that early communication reduces self-reported pandemic-related conspiratorial ideation in a sample of respondents from 51 countries. Overall, our results provide evidence that interest in extreme ideas, like QAnon, are highly responsive to government risk communication, while less extreme forms of conspiracism are perhaps less so.

How does globalization affect COVID-19 responses?

BACKGROUND: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vast differences in approaches to the control and containment of coronavirus across the world and has demonstrated the varied success of such approaches in minimizing the transmission of coronavirus. While previous studies have demonstrated high predictive power of incorporating air travel data and governmental policy responses in global disease transmission modelling, factors influencing the decision to implement travel and border restriction policies have attracted relatively less attention. This paper examines the role of globalization on the pace of adoption of international travel-related non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the coronavirus pandemic. This study aims to offer advice on how to improve the global planning, preparation, and coordination of actions and policy responses during future infectious disease outbreaks with empirical evidence. METHODS AND DATA: We analyzed data on international travel restrictions in response to COVID-19 of 185 countries from January to October 2020. We applied time-to-event analysis to examine the relationship between globalization and the timing of travel restrictions implementation. RESULTS: The results of our survival analysis suggest that, in general, more globalized countries, accounting for the country-specific timing of the virus outbreak and other factors, are more likely to adopt international travel restrictions policies. However, countries with high government effectiveness and globalization were more cautious in implementing travel restrictions, particularly if through formal political and trade policy integration. This finding is supported by a placebo analysis of domestic NPIs, where such a relationship is absent. Additionally, we find that globalized countries with high state capacity are more likely to have higher numbers of confirmed cases by the time a first restriction policy measure was taken. CONCLUSIONS: The findings highlight the dynamic relationship between globalization and protectionism when governments respond to significant global events such as a public health crisis. We suggest that the observed caution of policy implementation by countries with high government efficiency and globalization is a by-product of commitment to existing trade agreements, a greater desire to 'learn from others' and also perhaps of 'confidence' in a government's ability to deal with a pandemic through its health system and state capacity. Our results suggest further research is warranted to explore whether global infectious disease forecasting could be improved by including the globalization index and in particular, the de jure economic and political, and de facto social dimensions of globalization, while accounting for the mediating role of government effectiveness. By acting as proxies for a countries' likelihood and speed of implementation for international travel restriction policies, such measures may predict the likely time delays in disease emergence and transmission across national borders.

Child labor and psychosocial wellbeing: Findings from India.

Mental health is a neglected health issue in developing countries. We test if mental health issues are particularly likely to occur among some of the most vulnerable children in developing countries: those that work. Despite falling in recent decades, child labor still engages 168 million children across the world. While the negative impacts of child labor on physical health are well documented, the effect of child labor on a child's psychosocial wellbeing has been neglected. We investigate this issue with a new dataset of 947 children aged 12-18 years from 750 households in 20 villages across five districts of Tamil Nadu, India. Our purpose-built survey allows for a holistic approach to the analysis of child wellbeing by accounting for levels of happiness, hope, emotional wellbeing, self-efficacy, fear and stress. We use a variety of econometric approaches, some of which utilize household-level fixed effects and account for differences between working and nonworking siblings. We document a robust, large and negative association between child labor and most measures of psychosocial wellbeing. The results are robust to a battery of exercises, including tests for selection on unobservables, randomization inference, instrumental variable techniques, and falsification exercises.

Risk attitudes and human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalisation risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that risk-taking attitudes are a critical factor in predicting reductions in human mobility and social confinement around the globe. We find that the sharp decline in mobility after the WHO (World Health Organization) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic can be attributed to risk attitudes. Our results suggest that regions with risk-averse attitudes are more likely to adjust their behavioural activity in response to the declaration of a pandemic even before official government lockdowns. Further understanding of the basis of responses to epidemics, e.g., precautionary behaviour, will help improve the containment of the spread of the virus.

How confidence in health care systems affects mobility and compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Confidence in the health care system implies an expectation that sufficient and appropriate treatments will be provided if needed. The COVID-19 public health crisis is a significant, global, and (mostly) simultaneous test of the behavioral implications arising from this confidence. We explore whether populations reporting low levels of confidence in the health care system exhibit a stronger behavioral reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. We track the dynamic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic across 38 European countries and 621 regions by employing a large dataset on human mobility generated between February 15 and June 5, 2020 and a broad range of contextual factors (e.g., deaths or policy implementations). Using a time-dynamic framework we find that societies with low levels of health care confidence initially exhibit a faster response with respect to staying home. However, this reaction plateaus sooner, and after the plateau it declines with greater magnitude than does the response from societies with high health care confidence. On the other hand, regions with higher confidence in the health care system are more likely to reduce mobility once the government mandates that its citizens are not to leave home except for essential trips, compared to those with lower health care system confidence. Regions with high trust in the government but low confidence in the health care system dramatically reduce their mobility, suggesting a correlation for trust in the state with respect to behavioral responses during a crisis.