Existing commentaries on government responses to COVID-19 have focused on such factors as competent leadership, policy instruments, or cultural dispositions. Yet, few have provided a synthesis that examines how these factors relate to each other. This article fills this gap in the debate by comparing COVID-19 responses among five advanced economies in East Asia: Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Although agile actions and competence of top leadership are necessary to confront an unprecedented crisis, they are by themselves insufficient. Equally critical is whether a society has the necessary institutional infrastructure in place when a crisis strikes. Policy instruments are more likely to succeed when existing institutional infrastructure supports their administration and implementation. For an instrument to generate enduring impact, it must be compatible with a polity’s underlying culture; instruments that accommodate the underlying cultural orientations are more likely to elicit public cooperation and voluntary compliance over time. Policy instruments must also address equity issues by reaching marginalized groups across all layers of the population. Progress in emergency management may be visible in mainstream society but masking brewing problems among marginalized groups. A comparison across the five advanced economies in East Asia yields several implications for comparative research and policy.

What drives regulatees' behaviors when the institution of law is weak? This study seeks to answer the question by examining environmental regulation enforcement in China. Based on survey and interview data on Hong Kong-owned manufacturing enterprises in the Pearl River Delta Region, Guangdong Province, we found that their decisions to adopt basic and proactive environmental management practices were less driven by concerns for legality than by their perceptions of the regulators' actions and gestures. Enterprises adopted basic environmental practices to avoid potential punishment, and they adopted more proactive practices to avoid potentially arbitrary impositions from regulatory officials. Regulated enterprises were more likely to adopt both basic and proactive environmental practices if they had less difficulties understanding the enforced regulations. These findings suggest important ways in which regulatory compliance behaviors in a developmental context may differ from those in Western countries.

To understand the extent to which a policy instrument’s early adoption is crucial in crisis management, we leverage unique worldwide data that record the daily evolution of policy mandate adoptions and COVID‐19 infection and mortality rates. The analysis shows that the mask mandate is consistently associated with lower infection rates in the short term, and its early adoption boosts the long‐term efficacy. By contrast, the other five policy instruments—domestic lockdowns, international travel bans, mass gathering bans, and restaurant and school closures—show weaker efficacy. Governments prepared for a public health crisis with stronger resilience or capacity and those with stronger collectivist cultures were quicker to adopt nationwide mask mandates. From a policy design perspective, policymakers must avoid overreacting with less effective instruments and underreacting with more effective ones during uncertain times, especially when interventions differ in efficacy and cost.

What makes urban policies more responsive to environment problems? Local politics in Taiwan is considered to have combined features of both the pro-growth urban regimes of Western democracies and the clientele network of an authoritarian regime. Such features have made the sector resistant to democratic reforms: long after the introduction of competitive elections, urban policies were still overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of power elites and thus the interest of disadvantaged groups was seriously under-represented. Nevertheless, cases of anti-growth politics in different localities indicate the possibility of democracy trickling down to the local level, thereby moving local politics beyond a mere preoccupation in rent-seeking activities towards a civic activism based on a shared agenda of social and environmental issues. How such a transformation can occur can be illustrated by the Hsiangshan Tidal Flat Development Project in Hsinchu city. That incident demonstrated that such procedural requirements as environmental impact assessment in public policy-making provided civic groups with a very powerful tool to prevent an unpopular developmental project from destroying the local ecosystem. The Hsinchu case illustrates the dynamics among institutional reforms, informal political arrangements and strategic responses of civil groups that have resulted in a transformation of traditional urban politics in Taiwan.

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This study examines the effects of internal motivations and external pressures on the integration of environmental management (EM) practices within manufacturing operations in China. The moderating role of perceptions toward the regulatory process is also considered along with comparisons between wholly Chinese-owned and foreign-owned enterprises. From a sample of 131 manufacturing companies in the Guangzhou area, it was found that the salience of fees and fines has a strong positive influence on perceptions toward the regulator (the local Environmental Protection Bureau, EPB). This also has a positive effect on perceptions toward regulations themselves for foreign-owned enterprises. Business-case motivations for EM positively shape enterprise perceptions toward regulations, whereas risk-reduction motivations have a negative effect on perceptions toward regulations in foreign-owned enterprises. Enterprise perceptions toward the regulatory process have direct effects on the integration of EM practices in wholly Chinese-owned enterprises, but in opposite directions. While positive perceptions toward regulations have positive influence, positive perceptions toward regulators (i.e., the EPB) negatively affect it. Overall, these results indicated that promoting the adoption of EM practices depends on convincing business leaders that EM practices contribute to profit making. The regulatory process can potentially promote these practices, but measures need to be taken to ensure that the regulator is not co-opted by the regulated, especially in wholly Chinese-owned enterprises.

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