Economic impacts of COVID-19 in China, Taiwan, and Japan

This paper compares the policy responses and economic outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, Taiwan, and Japan. We employ two analytical dimensions: coercion and crisis authority and digital governance and substitution capacity. Along these dimensions, the three cases occupy distinct positions and yielded divergent outcomes. China combined high crisis authority with digital surveillance and platform integration, achieving rapid early suppression and buffering consumer shocks through digital substitution, but at the cost of policy rigidity and a disruptive exit that generated sharp industrial swings. Taiwan paired democratically grounded crisis authority with strong public data integration, enabling targeted smart containment that maintained stable production without requiring blanket closures. Japan operated with low formal coercion and limited digital governance, relying on voluntary compliance and social norms; while mobility declined substantially, the lack of digital targeting left its contact-intensive services disproportionately vulnerable. These cases demonstrate that coercion alone is insufficient for durable economic resilience; equally critical is digital governance that enables targeted interventions and private-sector substitution.