A Comparative Study on Pandemic Response and Their Impact on Economic Growth: Evidence From COVID-19 Outbreak In Scandanavia

Abstract

Coronavirus strikes again with the delta variant and puts the world in a phase 3 pandemic state. Countries all over the world have adopted different response mechanisms to contain the virus's spread. Health officials call for lockdown strategies as Covid-19 cases rise in most countries. In a faster and more effective worldwide vaccination scenario, leading economies are racing towards "herd immunity" under an optimistic hypothesis, speeding the world's economic recovery. The justification behind countries making a move towards the open community approach is to keep the economy in good shape. Validating both "lockdown" and "herd immunity" approaches, Scandanavian countries were studied in this paper. Sweden, a Nordic member state that follows an open economy approach, and; Denmark, Finland, and Norway that follows strict social-distancing and lockdown strategies as a measure to flatten the curve were considered in this study. This can help assess each government policy's success or failure against containing the virus. IBM Cognos Business Intelligence platform is used to visualize the different factors affecting the economy namely, the number of infected people and the number of deaths per country. The analysis revealed that Sweden chose an open economy strategy, failed to sustain a stable economy, and continued its upward trajectory with a rising number of virus-related deaths. The comparison of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), inflation, and unemployment rates showed Sweden as one of the least, if not the worst, among other Nordics in flattening the curve. This research thus contradicts the notion of herd immunity as a measure to sustain a healthy economy to be no longer valid.