Abstract:
The scale of impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on society and the economy globally
provides a strong incentive to thoroughly analyze the efficiency of healthcare systems in
dealing with the current pandemic and to obtain lessons to prepare healthcare systems
to be better prepared for future pandemics. In the absence of a proven vaccine or cure,
non-pharmaceutical interventions including social distancing, testing and contact tracing,
isolation, and wearing of masks are essential in the fight against the worldwide COVID-
19 pandemic. We use data envelopment analysis and data compiled from Worldometers
and The World Bank to analyze how efficient the use of resources were to stabilize the
rate of infections and minimize death rates in the top 36 countries that represented 90%
of global infections and deaths out of 220 countries as of November 11, 2020. This is
the first paper to model the technical efficiency of countries in managing the COVID-
19 pandemic by modeling death rates and infection rates as undesirable outputs using
the approach developed by You and Yan. We find that the average efficiency of global
healthcare systems in managing the pandemic is very low, with only six efficient systems
out of a total of 36 under the variable returns to scale assumption. This finding suggests
that, holding constant the size of their healthcare systems (because countries cannot alter
the size of a healthcare system in the short run), most of the sample countries showed
low levels of efficiency during this time of managing the pandemic; instead it is suspected
that most countries literally “threw” resources at fighting the pandemic, thereby probably
raising inefficiency through wasted resource use.
