Topic: What Matters the Most in Curbing Early COVID-19 Mortality? A Cross-Country Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA)
Speaker: Prof. Bin Chen, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College,City University of New York, USA
Moderator: Gu Xuan, Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, SWUFE
Time: 9:00 am, Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Virtual Platform :Tencent Meeting ID: 649 158 287
Organizers: School of Public Administration,Office of International Exchange and Cooperation,Research Office
Speaker’s Profile：
Bin Chen is a professor in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, and a doctoral faculty at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY). His research spans collaborative governance in public policy implementation, government-nonprofit relations, regional networked governance, and comparative public administration and policy, with methodological focuses on social network analysis (SNA), qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), and necessary condition analysis (NCA). His recent publications appear in the American Review of Public Administration, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, and others. He received his Ph.D. in Public Administration from the University of Southern California, M.Sc. in Public Administration and Public Policy from London School of Economics and Political Science, and B.A. in English from Shanghai International Studies University.
Lecture Preview：
COVID-19 represents an extreme VUCA state: a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situation, in which bounded-rational policymakers across countries may not be able to do everything right, but must do critical things right in order to reduce the death toll. This study conceptualizes these critical things as necessary conditions that must be present for this outcome to occur. We articulate a policy-institution-demography framework that includes seven factors as potential candidates for necessary conditions. Using necessary condition analysis (NCA), this study pinpoints a delayed first response, political decentralization, an elderly population, and urbanization as four necessary conditions that have affected early COVID-19 mortality across 110 countries. The results highlight the critical role of a swift early public-health response as a malleable policy action in curbing early COVID-19 deaths, particularly for politically decentralized and highly urbanized countries with aging populations.
