Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
危机时期的信息操纵：来自新冠超额死亡率的证据
Manipulation of information in times of crisis: evidence from Covid excess mortality
摘要
Governmental information manipulation has been hard to measure and study systematically. This paper provides comparable country-level estimates of the extent of misinformation in official data, in a large and diverse set of countries. We hand-collect data from a variety of sources in 134 countries to estimate misreporting of Covid mortality in 2020-2021. We find that information manipulation by governments during this period was remarkably widespread: between 45%–55% of governments misreport the number of deaths. Misreporting is large in magnitude: together, the countries we study reported 5.08 million Covid deaths during 2020-2021, whereas actual Covid mortality was more than double, at 12.47 million. The lion’s share of misreporting cannot be attributed to a country’s capacity to accurately diagnose and report deaths. Contrary to some theoretical expectations, information manipulation takes the form of downplaying rather than exaggerating the severity of the crisis. What characterizes governments that manipulate information? We examine the role of macroeconomic incentives, culture, audience sophistication, and institutions. The evidence strongly suggests that misreporting is higher where governments face fewer social and institutional constraints; in countries holding elections during this period; and in countries with a communist legacy. Similar content being viewed by others
中文摘要
政府信息操纵一直难以被系统性地衡量和研究。本文在大量且多样化的国家中，提供了关于官方数据中错误信息程度的可比国家层面估计。我们手工收集了134个国家多种来源的数据，以估算2020-2021年新冠死亡人数的误报情况。研究发现，在此期间政府的信息操纵行为异常普遍：45%至55%的政府误报了死亡人数。误报规模巨大：我们研究的国家在2020-2021年期间报告了508万新冠死亡病例，而实际新冠死亡率超过这一数字的两倍，达到1247万。绝大多数误报不能归因于国家准确诊断和报告死亡的能力。与某些理论预期相反，信息操纵表现为淡化而非夸大危机的严重性。那么，操纵信息的政府有何特征？我们考察了宏观经济激励、文化、受众成熟度以及制度的作用。证据强烈表明，在面临较少社会与制度约束的政府中、在选举期间的国家中、以及具有共产主义遗产的国家中，误报率更高。类似内容被其他人浏览。