South Korea was comparably successful both in limiting the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and in limiting its social and economic consequences. As of 15 January 2021, the country had registered 71,820 confirmed Corona cases and 1,217 deaths, and the economy was expected...

The coronavirus crisis has been an unusual event, with no obvious blueprint for action in terms of health or economic policies. Information and knowledge regarding how the pandemic would unfold was and remains incomplete; moreover, lockdown-style restrictions are well...

Spain was one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19 worldwide, both in terms of infections and deaths. The number of coronavirus cases recorded in Spain since the beginning of the pandemic officially exceeded two million at the beginning of January 2021 and the pandemic...

A key feature of Estonia’s performance during the COVID-19 crisis has been sectoral unevenness. This has mainly been caused by two factors: the varying maturity of institutional structures and paradigmatic policy change.

Portugal approached the pandemic in a largely unenviable position. It had a highly exposed healthcare system, with a very low number of intensive care beds (27th out of the 30 SGI countries in terms of “Intensive Care Beds”), a low number of ventilators (just over 1,000) and...

Finland is among the richest and happiest countries in the world. In spite of cuts in public spending over the past few decades, welfare state arrangements are an important cause of citizens’ satisfaction. Given this, Finland may have been in a better position than many...

Sweden’s approach to managing the coronavirus crisis was dominated by a series of nonbinding guidelines and recommendations that served as the framework for contagion mitigation measures throughout 2020 (Ludvigsson 2020, Petridou 2020), that is, “nudges against pandemics”...

France’s governance of the pandemic crisis, its performances as well as its setbacks, has to be placed into a larger context in two respects: First, when the pandemic hit France, the country was already feeling the effects of a certain number of both past and ongoing crises;...

Switzerland was one of the first European countries to be affected by the coronavirus pandemic. As with other countries that were affected early, Switzerland took longer to respond than countries that were affected later (Kohler et al. 2020; Wenger et al. 2020), because...

The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered Germany’s political, economic and social systems a severe and comprehensive stress test. Judging on the basis of the first year of the pandemic, the country and its institutions have demonstrated, overall, considerable resilience. So far,...