The socio-economic determinants of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

Viktor Stojkoski; Zoran Utkovski; Petar Jolakoski; Dragan Tevdovski; Ljupco Kocarev

where for simplicity we denote both the log of registered COVID-19 cases per million population and the log of COVID-19 deaths per million population of country i as y i . We focus on registered quantities normalized on per capita basis for the dependent variable instead of raw values 3 as a means to eliminate the bias in the outcome arising as a consequence of the discrepancies in the sizes of the studied countries. In the equation, X m i it is a k m dimensional vector of socioeconomic explanatory variables that determine the dependent variable, β m is the vector describing their marginal contributions, β 0 is the intercept of the regression, and u i is the error term. The s i term controls for the impact of social distancing measures of the countries, and γ is its coefficient. Finally, we also include the term d i , with δ capturing its marginal effect, that measures the duration of the pandemics within the economy. This allows us to control for the possibility that the countries are in a different state of the disease spreading process.