The health-economy trade-off during the Covid-19 pandemic: Communication matters

Abstract

How do people balance concerns for general health and economic outcomes during a pandemic? And, how does the communication of this trade-off affect individual preferences? We address these questions using a field experiment involving around 2000 students enrolled in a large university in Italy. We design four treatments where the trade-off is communicated using different combinations of a positive framing that focuses on protective strategies and a negative framing which refers to potential costs. We find that positive framing on the health side induces students to give greater relevance to the health dimension. The effect is sizeable and highly effective among many different audiences, especially females. Importantly, this triggers a higher level of intention to adhere to social distancing and precautionary behaviors. Moreover, irrespective of the framing, we find a large heterogeneity in students’ preferences over the trade-off. Economics students and students who have directly experienced the economic impact of the pandemic are found to give greater value to economic outcomes.

Moral Preferences over Taboo Trade-offs in the Time of Coronavirus

“…These problems have been extensively studied with hypothetical scenarios -see review in ( 16)and sometimes in the field. The global characterization of preferences complements the studies that investigate a trade-off involving more dimensions related to the pandemic, but only locally (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22) and those that estimate the individual welfare costs or economic concerns related to containment measures (23,24). To our knowledge, our project is the first to propose a direct estimation of moral preferences over the full space of reasonable outcomes.…”

“…The power analysis based on a non-parametric rank-sum test of individual preferences delivers similar results. Let us assume that preferences are linear and mostly oriented to contain fatalities, as represented by the distribution of the weight attributed to economic outcomes following a Beta (2,18), i.e. with mean 0.1 and standard deviation 0.0645.…”

Public Health Management of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Australia: The Role of the Morrison Government

“…Importantly, framing of policy choices is likely to affect public perceptions [ 80 ], and so the continued public attacks by Commonwealth ministers, including by the Prime Minister, probably contributed to undermining the perceived legitimacy of state-imposed public health measures. Even though state public health measures were supported by the public [ 81 ], especially in Western Australia where the state government was overwhelmingly returned in the 2021 state election [ 82 ], Commonwealth government criticism weakened the social mandate for state public health measures.…”

Basic personal values in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy: A two-wave longitudinal study

“…Italy is one of the countries that have experienced the most dramatic economic consequences from the outbreak [34]. The trade-off between public health and economy has been a recurrent theme in the public discourse [35]. We therefore have investigated the role of economic condition as predictor of value change.…”