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Fulltext Save lives or save livelihoods? A cross-country analysis of COVID-19 pandemic and economic growth

Feng Q, Wu GL, Yuan M, Zhou S

J Econ Behav Organ, 2022 May;197:221-256.
PMID: 35287307 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.02.027

This paper studies whether containing COVID-19 pandemic by stringent strategies deteriorates or saves economic growth. Since there are country-specific factors that could affect both economic growth and deaths due to COVID-19, we first start with a cross-country analysis on identifying risk and protective factors on the COVID-19 deaths using large across-country variation. Using data on 100 countries from 3 January to 27 November 2020 and taking into account the possibility of underreporting, we find that for deaths per million population, GDP per capita, population density, and income inequality are the three most important risk factors; government effectiveness, temperature, and hospital beds are the three most important protective factors. Second, inspired by the stochastic frontier literature, we construct a measure of pandemic containment effectiveness (PCE) after controlling for country-specific factors and rank countries by their PCE scores for deaths. Finally, by linking the PCE score with GDP growth data in Quarters 2 and 3 of 2020, we find that PCE is positively associated with economic growth in major economies. Countries with average PCE scores, such as Malaysia, would gain more GDP growth by 3.47 percentage points if they could improve their PCE scores for deaths to South Korea's level in Q2 of 2020. Therefore, there is not a trade-off between lives and livelihood facing by governments. Instead, to save economy, it is important to contain the pandemic first. Our conclusion is also mainly valid for infections due to COVID-19.
Fulltext Health systems efficiency in China and ASEAN, 2015-2020: a DEA-Tobit and SFA analysis application

Kang J, Peng R, Feng J, Wei J, Li Z, Huang F, et al.

BMJ Open, 2023 Sep 06;13(9):e075030.
PMID: 37673450 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2023-075030

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the health systems efficiency in China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries from 2015 to 2020.
DESIGN: Health efficiency analysis using data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier approach analysis.
SETTING: Health systems in China and ASEAN countries.
METHODS: DEA-Malmquist model and SFA model were used to analyse the health system efficiency among China and ASEAN countries, and the Tobit regression model was employed to analyse the factors affecting the efficiency of health system among these countries.
RESULTS: In 2020, the average technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of China and 10 ASEAN countries' health systems were 0.700, 1 and 0.701, respectively. The average total factor productivity (TFP) index of the health systems in 11 countries from 2015 to 2020 was 0.962, with a decrease of 1.4%, among which the average technical efficiency index was 1.016, and the average technical progress efficiency index was 0.947. In the past 6 years, the TFP index of the health system in Malaysia was higher than 1, while the TFP index of other countries was lower than 1. The cost efficiency among China and ASEAN countries was relatively high and stable. The per capita gross domestic product (current US$) and the urban population have significant effects on the efficiency of health systems.
CONCLUSIONS: Health systems inefficiency is existing in China and the majority ASEAN countries. However, the lower/middle-income countries outperformed high-income countries. Technical efficiency is the key to improve the TFP of health systems. It is suggested that China and ASEAN countries should enhance scale efficiency, accelerate technological progress and strengthen regional health cooperation according to their respective situations.
Fulltext A 3.4-kb Copy-Number Deletion near EPAS1 Is Significantly Enriched in High-Altitude Tibetans but Absent from the Denisovan Sequence

Lou H, Lu Y, Lu D, Fu R, Wang X, Feng Q, et al.

Am J Hum Genet, 2015 Jul 02;97(1):54-66.
PMID: 26073780 DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2015.05.005

Tibetan high-altitude adaptation (HAA) has been studied extensively, and many candidate genes have been reported. Subsequent efforts targeting HAA functional variants, however, have not been that successful (e.g., no functional variant has been suggested for the top candidate HAA gene, EPAS1). With WinXPCNVer, a method developed in this study, we detected in microarray data a Tibetan-enriched deletion (TED) carried by 90% of Tibetans; 50% were homozygous for the deletion, whereas only 3% carried the TED and 0% carried the homozygous deletion in 2,792 worldwide samples (p < 10(-15)). We employed long PCR and Sanger sequencing technologies to determine the exact copy number and breakpoints of the TED in 70 additional Tibetan and 182 diverse samples. The TED had identical boundaries (chr2: 46,694,276-46,697,683; hg19) and was 80 kb downstream of EPAS1. Notably, the TED was in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD; r(2) = 0.8) with EPAS1 variants associated with reduced blood concentrations of hemoglobin. It was also in complete LD with the 5-SNP motif, which was suspected to be introgressed from Denisovans, but the deletion itself was absent from the Denisovan sequence. Correspondingly, we detected that footprints of positive selection for the TED occurred 12,803 (95% confidence interval = 12,075-14,725) years ago. We further whole-genome deep sequenced (>60×) seven Tibetans and verified the TED but failed to identify any other copy-number variations with comparable patterns, giving this TED top priority for further study. We speculate that the specific patterns of the TED resulted from its own functionality in HAA of Tibetans or LD with a functional variant of EPAS1.

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