Mariia Kashcha

The coronavirus pandemic confirmed that national systems of medical and social provision for the population of various countries could not quickly adapt and implement effective measures to prevent the negative consequences from achieving a state of resilience. The article empirically substantiates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on national social brand to form effective mechanisms for countering risks in public health and supporting the social brand of the country for its main internal stakeholders in a period of uncertainty. The article is devoted to analyzing the channels through which the COVID-19 pandemic affected various aspects of the national management systems of Austria, Slovenia, France, and Ukraine. The analysis used a combination of correlation analysis, causal modeling, and the construction of cognitive maps to visualize dependencies. It was revealed that the key indicators that verify the mentioned impact are the satisfaction of the needs for medical examination and care, the availability of hospital beds in the medical system, and the general costs of social protection of the population. The indicator of the social attractiveness of the country for its internal stakeholders is the indicator of net migration, and it is empirically determined that this indicator is significantly influenced by the security of the medical system and the efficiency of its functioning, especially during the period of data analysis, taking into account the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The dependence between the social and economic well-being of the population and its tendency to critically assess one's health, readiness for disease prevention, and the formation of higher requirements for medical care was revealed. The determined regularities are useful in developing a national strategy for building an effective medical and social security system for the population in conditions of uncertainty, which is a significant component of the overall attractiveness of the country and its brand management.

The purpose of the study is to analyze the presence of functional interrelationships between the level of funding of the healthcare sector and the country’s ability to withstand any pandemic, using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. Official indicators presented by the WHO, analytical reports by Numbeo (the world’s largest cost-of-living database), and the Global Health Security Index were used for the study. Using these indicators, the authors analyzed the following: the level of the spread of coronavirus infections in the world’s countries, the share of public expenditures on the development of the medical sphere in the GDP of the countries, and the development of the healthcare sector in 12 developed countries and Ukraine. These countries were grouped into three groups, based on the model of the organization of the healthcare sector (Beveridge model, Bismark model, Market (private) model). The Farrar–Glauber method was used to check for multicollinearity in the input dataset, and thirteen relevant indicators were selected. These indicators took part in the formation of the generalized characteristics of the country’s medical sphere and the ability to resist the pandemic. The state of readiness of countries to resist the spread of coronavirus infections was assessed using the country’s index of vulnerability to COVID-19 and the integral index of the development of medicine. Additive convolution was used in combination with sigma-limited parameterization to form an integral index of the country’s vulnerability to COVID-19 and to determine the weights of each indicator. The convolution of indicators according to the Kolmogorov–Gabor polynomial was used to construct an integral index of the development of medicine. Thus, while analyzing the ability of countries to resist the pandemic in terms of models of organization of the healthcare sector, it should be noted that none of the models demonstrated absolute effectiveness in the fight against the mass spread of COVID-19. The calculations made it possible to determine the nature of the relationship between the integral indices of the development of medicine and the vulnerability of countries to COVID-19, as well as a country’s potential ability to resist any pandemic and prevent the mass spread of infectious diseases.