engleski

Investigating the socio-economic catalysers of COVID-19 spread

COVID-19 pandemic triggered on December 2019, in city of Wuhan, China, spread across the world causing global economic crisis and public health emergency. One could ask what are the socio-economic factors that catalyse the spread of the disease and why are some countries more plagued with the COVID-19 pandemic? The goal of this paper is to investigate the socio-economic catalysers of the COVID-19 spread. For that purpose, a cross-country regression analysis was conducted in three time points (April 1, 2020, April 15, 2020 and April 29, 2020) using OLS, Tobit and PPML estimators. The results of the analysis have shown that countries with higher gross domestic product per capita, population, HDI and HFI indices have been hardly hit with the global COVID-19 pandemic. Other variables have not been proven to be significant in the analysis. Limitations of the paper are related to data unavailability for the most recent year for some variables and methodology issues related to the fact that reported number of cases might be lower than the real number of infected people. Furthermore, some countries and regions in the world have not yet experienced the full spread of the disease. Therefore, the results obtained from this analysis should not be taken as conclusive and should be repeated taking into account additional time points and COVID-19 socio-economic catalysers.

COVID-19 ; spread catalysers ; socio-economic factors ; Tobit ; PPML

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