Table 3.

Determinants of testing policy and contact tracing: the role of democratic institutions and past experience with epidemics.

	(1)	(2)
	Testing	Contact tracing
Log number of COVID-19 cases	0.154	0.0762
	[0.0933]	[0.0959]
Cases $\times$ democracy (Polity)	-0.00563	-0.0213*
	[0.00917]	[0.0116]
Cases $\times$ experience with past epidemics	0.106***	-0.00926
	[0.0272]	[0.0294]
Observations	8521	8394
R-squared	0.571	0.456
Number of countries	118	117
Controls	$✓$	$✓$
Country FE	$✓$	$✓$
Time FE	$✓$	$✓$

Notes: This table presents OLS estimates from regressing indexes of testing (column 1) and contact tracing (column 2) on the log number of COVID-19 infections, and the interaction between cases and previous experience with epidemics. All specifications include an interaction between infections and: i) log GDP per capita; ii) mobile phone subscriptions per hundred people; iii) a dummy equal to 1 if a country scores below the average value of an index of government accountability and transparency. Errors are clustered at the country-level. The coefficients with ${}^{★}{}^{★}{}^{★}$ are significant at the 1% level, with ${}^{★}{}^{★}$ are significant at the 5% level, and with ${}^{★}$ are significant at the 10% level.