Is the spread of COVID-19 across countries influenced by environmental, economic and social factors?

Mohammad Alamgir Hossain

We apply Least Squares method on model (1) and find that precipitation and population density have no significant effect on the number of infection cases per one million people (Y). Those variables are then excluded, and the model is re-estimated. In the re-estimated model, the variables average temperature, openness and democracy appear as highly significant. We made some experimentations with lags 1 to 9 to estimate model (5) . In each case we first estimate model (3) and obtain the residuals, then estimate model (5) using the estimated residuals obtained from estimated model (3) . As the number of infections are still increasing day by day in almost all countries, the estimated model fits better with lower lag. We drop density and precipitation from our experimentations as they frequently appear insignificant. In all estimated model yearly average temperature, openness and democracy appear as highly significant.