The politics of lockdown policies: Evidence from Brazilian States

Published in Economic Affairs

We introduce a novel state-level measure of lockdown regulatory freedom to study the severity of lockdowns for Brazilian states and its determinants. Our main results show that lockdown policies were not consistently determined by any health-related variable, such as the number of doctors, hospital beds, the share of the population with private health insurance, or the share of the population 65 years of age and older or Covid-19 cases and deaths. Indeed, the only variable consistently related to lockdown policies in all specifications and robustness checks was the state's share of votes for the right-wing candidate. A one standard deviation increase in the share of votes for the right-wing candidate is associated with a 0.6–0.87 standard deviation increase in lockdown stringency. Our results highlight the importance of political economy considerations in explaining the incentives of policymakers when designing health policies.

Data

Adjusted State Economic Freedom Scores

Revised-IMLEE.xlsx contains the adjusted state economic freedom scores for 2019, 2020, and 2021, using the Mackenzie Index of State Economic Freedom (Índice Mackenzie de Liberdade Econômica Estadual, IMLEE) (Maciel et al. 2019)

The adjustments are based on the methodology of Miozzi and Powell (2023) and the accompanying spreadsheet detail all the calculations (see below).

Lockdown Regulatory Freedom

The exact calculations are available in LRF-Methodology.xlsx. The data is based on the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) (Hale et al. 2021) and modified to include only mandatory restrictions on economic freedom.

Support

If you any have questions regarding the data, please contact us:

JP Bastos: Joao-Pedro.Bastos [at] ttu.edu or Vincent Miozzi: vmiozzi [at] flsouthern.edu

References

• Hale, T. et al. (2021). A global panel database of pandemic policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker). Nature Human Behaviour, 5(4), 529-538. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01079-8
• Maciel, V., de Gamboa, U. R., Portillo, J., & Ghizellini, M. (2019). Brazilian states’ economic freedom index: Applying Fraser’s methodology for 2003–2016 data. Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, 22(3), 428-452.
• Miozzi, V. and Powell, B. (2023). US state-level economic freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic. American Journal of Economics and Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12512