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

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

We measure the duration of pandemics in a country simply as the number of days since the first registered case, whereas in order to assess the effect of government restrictions we construct a stringency index. Mathematically, the index quantifies the average daily variation in government responses to the pandemic dynamics. As a measure for the daily variation we take the Oxford Covid-19 stringency index 2 . The Oxford Covid-19 stringency index is a composite measure that combines the daily effect of policies on school closures, reduction of internal movement, travel bans and other similar restrictions. For each country, we construct a weighted average of the index from all available data since their first registered coronavirus case up to the last date of data gathering. To emphasize the effect of policy restrictions implemented on an earlier date in calculating the average value, we put a larger weight on those dates. This is because earlier restrictions have obviously a bigger impact on the prevention of the spread of the virus. The procedure implemented to derive the average government stringency index is described in greater detail in Section S2.1 of the Supplementary Material (SM). Fig 2 visualizes the results from the baseline model. We observe that the countries which had stringer policies also had less COVID-19 cases and deaths, as expected. In addition, the countries with longer duration of the crisis registered more cases and deaths per million population, though, the effect of this variable is negligible.