Saturday 29 May 2021

The impact of epidemics on generalised trust

A few weeks ago, the Waikato Economics Discussion Group looked at this article by Arnstein Aasve, Guido Alfani, Francesco Gandolfi (all Bocconi University), and Marco Le Moglie (Catholic University of the Sacred Hearth), published in the journal Health Economics (ungated earlier version here). Aasve looked at a particularly timely topic - the impact of the Spanish Flu (1918-1919) on generalised trust.

This is a difficult topic to investigate, because there are no measures of generalised trust available for the 1918-1919 period (or immediately before and after, which is what you'd really want). Instead, Aasve et al. use data from the U.S. General Social Survey from 1978-2018 to infer measures of social trust for earlier generations. Specifically:

Survey respondents were also asked about their country of ethnic origin and a series of questions regarding their migration history: whether they were born in the United States or not, whether their mother and father were born in the United States and the number of grandparents born outside the country. Using this information, we group respondents on the basis of their country of ethnic origin and categorize them in three waves of immigration: second-generation Americans (i.e., people born in the United States with at least one parent and all the grandparents born abroad), third‐generation Americans (i.e., people with at least two immigrant grandparents and both parents born in the United States) and fourth‐generation Americans (i.e., people with more than two grandparents born in the United States and both parents born in the United States). We exploit different waves of immigration to measure the intergenerational path of social capital transmission by people migrated before and after the spread of the Spanish flu (i.e., 1918)...

It's quite an ingenious method, although it relies on a fairly strong assumption of intergenerational transmission of social trust. They have measures of trust from the GSS for 18 origin countries (Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). Comparing levels of trust between countries at different levels of flu mortality, they find:

...a negative and significant effect of the Spanish Flu on trust. An increase in influenza mortality of one death per thousand resulted in a 1.4 percentage points decrease in trust.

Since mortality rates ranged between about 2 deaths per thousand and 20 deaths per thousand, moving from the bottom to the top of the distribution would decrease trust by around 25 percentage points, which is quite meaningful. Aasve et al. then go on to investigate potential mechanisms underlying their results:

A narrower resonance of the war within neutral countries, together with the specific lack of war censorship on media, might have led their respective citizens to internalize the extent and severity of the pandemic, and thus altered their social interactions accordingly... Consistently with this hypothesis, we do find a stronger reduction in social trust for the descendants of people migrating from countries heavily hit by the epidemic and that remained neutral during the war.

Of relevance to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they conclude that:

...if, during the Spanish Flu, the failure of government institutions and national health care services to contain the crisis led civil societies to experience a serious breakdown due to the climate of generalized suspicion (a situation further exacerbated by mistakes in communication, also due to war censorship) and this increased the persistent damage to social capital, then governments facing COVID‐19 today might have an additional reason to opt for strong policies of pandemic containment. While these are undoubtedly costly in the short run, it might be that they will contribute to minimize some economic costs to be paid in the long run.

However, as noted in the EDG group meeting where we discussed this paper, you could also interpret the results as suggesting that countries that did not heavily censor their media during the Spanish Flu pandemic suffered greater losses in generalised trust. Therefore censoring the media has a protective effect and governments that wanted to maintain high levels of trust should censor their media. Before we conclude that Russia or China has a better approach to maintaining the generalised trust of their population though, I think we need to see whether these results replicate for the current crisis.

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