Tubadji Annie, Boy Frédéric, Webber Don J
Economic Department, Swansea University, Swansea, UK.
University College London, London, UK.
Appl Res Qual Life. 2023;18(1):43-70. doi: 10.1007/s11482-022-10109-0. Epub 2022 Oct 29.
General public's mental health can be affected by the public policy response to a pandemic threat. Britain, Italy and Sweden have had very distinct approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic: early lock-down, delayed lock-down and no-lock-down. We develop a novel narrative economics of language Culture-Based Development approach, and using Google trend data for seed keywords, death and suicide, we reach two main conclusions: (i) while countries had a pre-existing culturally relative disposition towards death-related anxiety, the sensitivity to the public policy towards COVID-19 was also country specific; (ii) however, significant spillovers from one specific national lockdown public policy to another country's mental health are identified.
公众心理健康可能会受到针对大流行威胁的公共政策反应的影响。英国、意大利和瑞典在应对新冠疫情方面采取了截然不同的方法：早期封锁、延迟封锁和不封锁。我们开发了一种基于语言文化发展的新型叙事经济学方法，并使用谷歌趋势数据中的种子关键词“死亡”和“自杀”，得出两个主要结论：（i）虽然各国在与死亡相关的焦虑方面预先存在文化相对倾向，但对新冠疫情公共政策的敏感度也因国家而异；（ii）然而，我们发现一个国家特定的封锁公共政策对另一个国家的心理健康存在显著溢出效应。
