Narrative Economics, Public Policy and Mental Health

Annie Tubadji; Frédéric Boy; Don J Webber

doi:10.1007/s11482-022-10109-0

Narrative Economics, Public Policy and Mental Health

Appl Res Qual Life. 2023;18(1):43-70. doi: 10.1007/s11482-022-10109-0. Epub 2022 Oct 29.

Authors

Annie Tubadji¹, Frédéric Boy^{1

2}, Don J Webber³

Affiliations

¹ Economic Department, Swansea University, Swansea, UK.
² University College London, London, UK.
³ Sheffield University, Sheffield, UK.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; Cultural hysteresis; Cultural narrative; Culture based development; Health; Narrative economics; Public policy; Shocks.