The COVID-19 pandemic has become an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis. The present study has built a theoretical model and used it to develop an empirical strategy, analyzing the drivers of policy-response agility during the outbreak. Our empirical results show that national policy responses were delayed, both by government expectations of the healthcare system capacity and by expectations that any hard measures used to manage the crisis would entail severe economic costs. With decision-making based on incomplete information, the agility of national policy responses increased as knowledge increased and uncertainty decreased in relation to the epidemic's evolution and the policy responses of other countries.
© 2021 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.