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The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis and an inspection of national governance systems and crisis response capabilities of countries globally. China has adopted a tough accountability system for officials and has succeeded in containing the spread of the pandemic. This study ai...

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Autores principales: Zeng, Shian, Yi, Chengdong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9512989/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36163037
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41256-022-00268-w
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author Zeng, Shian
Yi, Chengdong
author_facet Zeng, Shian
Yi, Chengdong
author_sort Zeng, Shian
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis and an inspection of national governance systems and crisis response capabilities of countries globally. China has adopted a tough accountability system for officials and has succeeded in containing the spread of the pandemic. This study aimed to assess the impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control based on the official promotion tournament theory and utility maximization analysis framework. METHODS: The panel data of 237 Chinese cities were extracted with local officials’ characteristics, confirmed cases, Baidu migration index, Baidu search index according to city names, and data were excluded with local officials’ relocation or sub-provincial cities between January 1, 2020 and May 5, 2020. Promotion gain and accountability cost were constructed by adopting promotion speed indicator, and the research hypotheses were assumed based on the utility maximization. It was the first time to apply the interaction model to empirically investigate the relationship between the promotion speed of local officials and the COVID-19 confirmed cases. RESULTS: Our study showed that the promotion speed of provincial governors and mayors significantly affected the number of confirmed cases (β = − 11.615, P < 0.01). There was a significant interaction between the promotion speeds of provincial governors and mayors (β = − 2594.1, P < 0.01), indicating that they had a coordinated effect on the pandemic control. Additionally, mayors with different promotion speeds made a significant difference in controlling the imported cases and those who promoted faster better controlled the imported cases (β = − 0.841, P < 0.01). Mayors with full-time postgraduate education, titles, and majors in science and engineering had a better effect on controlling the number of confirmed cases. CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides evidence that the official accountability system has played an important role in containing the pandemic, which suggests that local officials motivated by the accountability system would respond to the pandemic actively for higher utility. Furthermore, provincial governors and mayors have played a coordinated effect in pandemic control. The above evidences reveal that implementing the official accountability system could improve the government’s emergency management capability and the efficiency of pandemic control. Therefore, adopting a strict accountability system could be effective in pandemic containment globally, especially in centralized countries.
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spelling pubmed-95129892022-09-27 The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization Zeng, Shian Yi, Chengdong Glob Health Res Policy Research BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis and an inspection of national governance systems and crisis response capabilities of countries globally. China has adopted a tough accountability system for officials and has succeeded in containing the spread of the pandemic. This study aimed to assess the impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control based on the official promotion tournament theory and utility maximization analysis framework. METHODS: The panel data of 237 Chinese cities were extracted with local officials’ characteristics, confirmed cases, Baidu migration index, Baidu search index according to city names, and data were excluded with local officials’ relocation or sub-provincial cities between January 1, 2020 and May 5, 2020. Promotion gain and accountability cost were constructed by adopting promotion speed indicator, and the research hypotheses were assumed based on the utility maximization. It was the first time to apply the interaction model to empirically investigate the relationship between the promotion speed of local officials and the COVID-19 confirmed cases. RESULTS: Our study showed that the promotion speed of provincial governors and mayors significantly affected the number of confirmed cases (β = − 11.615, P < 0.01). There was a significant interaction between the promotion speeds of provincial governors and mayors (β = − 2594.1, P < 0.01), indicating that they had a coordinated effect on the pandemic control. Additionally, mayors with different promotion speeds made a significant difference in controlling the imported cases and those who promoted faster better controlled the imported cases (β = − 0.841, P < 0.01). Mayors with full-time postgraduate education, titles, and majors in science and engineering had a better effect on controlling the number of confirmed cases. CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides evidence that the official accountability system has played an important role in containing the pandemic, which suggests that local officials motivated by the accountability system would respond to the pandemic actively for higher utility. Furthermore, provincial governors and mayors have played a coordinated effect in pandemic control. The above evidences reveal that implementing the official accountability system could improve the government’s emergency management capability and the efficiency of pandemic control. Therefore, adopting a strict accountability system could be effective in pandemic containment globally, especially in centralized countries. BioMed Central 2022-09-27 /pmc/articles/PMC9512989/ /pubmed/36163037 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41256-022-00268-w Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Research
Zeng, Shian
Yi, Chengdong
The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization
title The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization
title_full The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization
title_fullStr The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization
title_full_unstemmed The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization
title_short The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization
title_sort impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in china based on utility maximization
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9512989/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36163037
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41256-022-00268-w
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