Islands, remoteness and effective policy making: Aotearoa New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic

Aotearoa New Zealand has been identified, by several measures, as being one of a few developed countries that have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic in the best possible way. This outcome is generally attributed to strict but effective public health measures that included - besides very high vaccination rates - national and regional lockdowns, as well as total closure of the border except for returning citizens (who were subject to mandatory quarantining). Concurrent fiscal and monetary policies contributed to economic outcomes that remained remarkably buoyant. In this paper we assess the importance of public interventions in New Zealand triggered by the pandemic relative to the mitigating effects of the country being an island nation with a small population scale, low population density and remote location. We summarize the recent international literature, estimate simple but representative cross-country regression models, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the public policy response. We find that the favourable effects of low average population density, remoteness and the absence of land borders have indeed been of great benefit. Geography assisted in the effectiveness of the elimination strategy which was only abandoned in favour of a mitigation strategy once the less severe but highly contagious Omicron variants arrived in early 2022. Hence, while a remote and peripheral location is generally seen as economically disadvantageous, during a pandemic it delays the spread of a viral disease and provides the opportunity to focus on interventions to maintain economic activity, develop effective public health responses and learn from the experience of less remote nations.