MESA Banner
COVID-19 Policy Tracker: MENA Government Responses to the Crisis
Abstract
Tracking the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic worldwide has generally focused on the spread of COVID-19, numbers of cases, recoveries, vaccination rates, and deaths, but has also generated efforts at tracking policy responses by governments across the globe. This paper focuses on one such policy tracker, the “COVID-19 Policy Tracker: MENA Government Responses to the Crisis”. It comprises twelve Middle Eastern and North African countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE), for the period of February 1, 2020, to December 31, 2021, tracking government policies, interventions, and measures in the fields of public health, economic and fiscal, and social policy. The paper situates this policy tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discusses its unique features, and presents key results on the policy responses to the pandemic in the MENA region. The key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, effectiveness, and sustainability of public health measures varied widely across the sample countries and over time; economic and fiscal policy measures looked essentially similar across the sample but varied greatly in terms of their intensity, sustainability, and the public investments made; and social policy measures, for the most part, appear to have been disproportional to the obvious social challenges linked to COVID-19 across the MENA region, to varying degrees.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Comparative