Policy Response to Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on the Vietnamese Economy: An Analysis of Social Media

Abstract

Amid the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide, many countries are hesitant to implement aggressive measures to curb the spread of the pandemic with the fear that this would damage their national economy. A question is whether there is an actual trade-off between saving lives and economic development. To answer this, we study the case of Vietnam, a successful story in combating the pandemic thanks to the Government’s immediate and rigorous policies. We collect official news related to the Covid-19 pandemic in Vietnam in the year 2020 by utilizing a self-developed web scraping tool. By analyzing the news data, we identify the key phases of the pandemic in Vietnam and the key Government policy announcements. We then contrast this information with the performance of the equity market and find that the two types of policies, including border and entry control and cross-country travel control, negatively impact the equity market, whilst the other policies hardly affect the stock market return. These findings suggest that government policies can be very efficient in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic; however, some of them almost cause no damage to the country’s economy. This study, therefore, efficiently depicts the relationship between pandemic combat and economic development. It also provides valuable guidance for other countries in terms of policy decisions during the current fight against the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in future community. health crises.