COVID-19 policy tracker: MENA government responses to the crisis

Tracking the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic worldwide has generally focused on the spread of COVID-19, numbers of cases, recoveries, vaccination rates, and deaths, but has also generated efforts at tracking policy responses by governments across the globe. This chapter focuses on one such policy tracker, the “COVID-19 Policy Tracker: MENA Government Responses to the Crisis.” It comprises 12 Middle Eastern and North African countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE), for the period of February 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021, tracking government policies and measures in the fields of public health, economic and fiscal, and social policy. The chapter situates this policy tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discusses its unique features, and presents key results on the policy responses to the pandemic in the MENA region. The key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, and sustainability of public health measures varied widely across the sample countries and over time; economic and fiscal policy measures looked essentially similar across the sample but varied greatly in terms of their intensity and the public investments made; and social policy measures for the most part appear to have been inadequate to the obvious social challenges linked to COVID-19 across the MENA region, with varying degrees.