Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

Spring 5-10-2024

Keywords

COVID-19 Restrictions, Public transportation, Work From Home, Sub-national governments, United States, China, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, New Zealand

Abstract

This research compares a country's mandate to shift to remote work between the federal and regional levels in comparison to PPP. We focus on how economic factors determine a country's ability to move to remote work and at what level of government the decision is made. The findings suggest that while there was variation in which level of government issued work-from-home requirements, there were strong trends for most mandates to come from the federal level. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of countries issued such federal mandates regardless of PPP. We then compare PPP per capita and the stringency of public transportation restrictions in low-income countries, expecting that countries with lower PPPs would have the incentive to keep public transportation available. At higher PPPs, population would likely have more access to technology and the ability to shift to remote work, and they also likely have more access to personal vehicles and rely less on public transportation. The findings show low correlation, but there are notable trends in the data. Our research suggests that there is room for further exploration with a broader range of observations and controls, including political and institutional controls. Additionally, we query whether countries with empowered sub-national governments saw more policy decisions on the regional level rather than the national one. Our findings here are generally null but open the door for future research on regional policy autonomy in unitary systems and potential decision space thresholds for crisis response.

Publisher Attribution

Open Repository Binghamton

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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