During 2020, Taiwan's facemask policy formed a critical part of its relatively successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also served to showcase capacities for coordinated action by state and business actors. This article demonstrates that Taiwan's ability to rapidly increase facemask production called for the government and key industry players to overcome a series of cooperation challenges. The authors show that the effective industry response required concerted action in three domains: the state sector, businessgovernment cooperation, and cooperation among private firms. This article makes two contributions. First, it differentiates the dynamics attached to coordination, commitment and collective action challenges that actors in public and private sectors needed to overcome in order to deliver on the policy. Second, it contributes to the literature by endorsing the view that businessgovernment cooperation and private sector coordination are complementary and interdependent. The findings presented here further illustrate the evolution of Taiwan's state institutions in their capacity to take on new tasks and modes of interaction with private sector actors.The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on the earlier versions of the manuscript. We also would like to recognize Taiwan's contribution to fighting the global pandemic, despite the adversities it faces.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.