Infectious disease control and its economic gains in a pandemic: the case of South Korea

We investigate the role of the infectious disease control (IDC) system in curbing the spread of infectious disease and preventing economic damage during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we propose incorporating a clustering analysis into the synthetic control method. This contributes to constructing a homogeneous donor pool, which is necessary for an unbiased treatment effect estimator. South Korea’s effective IDC system, the so-called K-Quarantine, is estimated to have reduced the number of disease infections and to have prevented a 3.6% loss of GDP and a 0.3%p rise in the unemployment rate in South Korea in 2020. These results are robust in an alternative reduced-form regression analysis under various specifications.