Causal Loop Diagramming of Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19: State-of-the-Art, Gaps and Good Practices

Abstract

The complexity, multidimensionality, and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted both researchers and policymakers to turn to transdisciplinary methods in dealing with the wickedness of the crisis. While there are increasing calls to use systems thinking to address the intricacy of COVID-19, examples of practical applications of systems thinking are still scarce. We revealed and reviewed eight studies which developed causal loop diagrams (CLDs) to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a broader socioeconomic system. We find that major drivers across all studies are the magnitude of the infection spread and government interventions to curb the pandemic, while the most impacted variables are public perception of the pandemic and the risk of infection. The reviewed COVID-19 CLDs consistently exhibit certain complexity patterns, for example, they contain a higher number of two- and three-element feedback loops than comparable random networks. However, they fall short in representing linear complexity such as multiple causes and effects, as well as cascading impacts. We also discuss good practices for creating and presenting CLDs using the reviewed diagrams as illustration. We suggest that increasing transparency and rigor of the CLD development processes can help to overcome the lack of systems thinking applications to address the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis.

Implications of COVID-19 Mitigation Policies for National Well-Being: A Systems Perspective

“…At the same time, compared to existing CLD applications to examine COVID-19 impact on a wider socio-economic system, our study has a more specific focus, i.e., national well-being, reflected in the choice of system components. Our study accounts for the mitigation policies that are also addressed in other studies, such as business closures, travel restrictions, and social distancing [76]. We also address the underrepresentation of inequality concerns observed in the CLDs analyzing COVID-19 impacts on a broader socio-economic system [76].…”

“…Our study accounts for the mitigation policies that are also addressed in other studies, such as business closures, travel restrictions, and social distancing [76]. We also address the underrepresentation of inequality concerns observed in the CLDs analyzing COVID-19 impacts on a broader socio-economic system [76]. As for the system driver, our CLD considers "Magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis", which aggregates typically used concepts such as number of infected people, number of deaths, and pressure on the healthcare system in one variable; a similar approach is also used in [18] to keep the number of the CLD components manageable.…”

“…While various CLD studies employ similar concepts, they are often formulated somewhat differently by different authors and, thus, are not entirely identical and directly comparable [76]. Following a call for standardization of concepts used in CLDs for COVID-19 assessment, we grounded our study in the existing frameworks, such as the OECD Well-being Framework and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna COVID-19 Control Strategies List (CCCSL).…”

“…According to the authors' knowledge, all recent state-of-the-art studies applying CLDs to examine socioeconomic effects of COVID-19 follow a similar approach, i.e., CLDs are designed based on the authors' expertise or, in one case, involving an expert workshop in addition [17]. Using such qualitative assessment is often helpful in case of novel challenges such as COVID-19 to rapidly develop an understanding of its implications [76]. Moreover, it enables including factors that are inherently difficult to quantify [98].…”

“…Systems mapping has been used in several studies that assessed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its mitigation policies on various components of a broader socioeconomic system [13,[15][16][17][18]74,75] (for a review, see [76]). However, no study dealt with their impact on the national well-being indicators.…”