Working Paper: Variation in government responses to COVID-19

Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Note: this working paper is regularly updated to reflect the changes in data; this is version 11.0 (24.03.21)

The COVID-19 outbreak has prompted a wide range of responses from governments around the world. There is a pressing need for up-to-date policy information as these responses proliferate, so that researchers, policymakers and the public can evaluate how best to address COVID-19. The authors introduce the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), providing a systematic way to track government responses to COVID-19 across countries and sub-national jurisdictions over time. The data is combined into a series of novel indices that aggregate various measures of government responses. These indices are used to describe variation in government responses, explore whether the government response affects the rate of infection, and identify correlates of more or less intense responses.