Anti-pandemic resilience assessment for countries along the Belt and Road route

Laijun Zhao; Mengmeng Min; Xiaoyan Huang; Ying Qian; Lixin Zhou; Pingle Yang

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2023.1152029

Anti-pandemic resilience assessment for countries along the Belt and Road route

Front Public Health. 2023 Nov 2:11:1152029. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1152029. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Laijun Zhao¹, Mengmeng Min¹, Xiaoyan Huang², Ying Qian¹, Lixin Zhou¹, Pingle Yang¹

Affiliations

¹ Business School, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
² Emergency Management Office, Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping the world, and countries along the Belt and Road (B&R) route have also been hit hard. However, the impact varied greatly from country to country, some severely and others mildly. What factors have led to such a wide variation?

Method: In this paper, we considered institutional, infrastructural, economic, social, and technological resilience as components of overall anti-pandemic resilience, and constructed a set of indicators to evaluate this resilience for B&R countries in 2020. We evaluated the anti-pandemic resilience using the combined empowerment-VIKOR method, and classified the countries into different resilience levels by means of hierarchical clustering. The validity of the evaluation indicator system was verified by analyzing the consistency between the actual performance and the assessed resilience.

Results: The ranking results showed that Israel and Bahrain were representative of countries that had the highest resilience, Hungary and Estonia represented countries with moderate resilience, and Laos and Cambodia represented countries with the lowest resilience. We also found that countries with high resilience had much better institutional and economic resilience than countries with moderate resilience, whereas countries with low resilience lagged behind in both infrastructural and social resilience. Based on these findings, policy recommendations were offered to help B&R countries respond to future pandemics.

Keywords: Belt and Road countries; COVID-19; VIKOR method; anti-epidemic; combined methods; empowerment method; pandemic response.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

COVID-19* / epidemiology
Cluster Analysis
Humans
Hungary
Israel
Pandemics*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71874108), the National Social Science Foundation of China (Projects Nos. 21BGL217, 22BGL240, and 22CGL050), and the Shanghai Soft Science Foundation of China (22692107800).