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

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

Economic performance: We evaluate the economic performance of a country through 6 variables. This performance often mirrors the country's ability to intervene in a case of a public health crisis [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] . Variables such as GDP per capita have been used in modeling health outcomes, mortality trends, cause-specific mortality estimation and health system performance and finances [43, 44] . For poor countries, economic performance appears to improve health by providing the means to meet essential needs such as food, clean water and shelter, as well access to basic health care services. However, after a country reaches a certain threshold of GDP per capita, few health benefits arise from further economic growth. It has been suggested that this is the reason why, contrary to expectations, the economic downturns during the 20th century were associated with declines in mortality rates [45, 46] . Observations indicate that what drives the health in industrialized countries is not absolute wealth or growth but how the nation's resources are shared across the population [47] . The more egalitarian income distribution within a rich country is associated with better health of population [48] [49] [50] [51] . Nevertheless, it is also known that in better economies the trade interactions and mobility of people is faster, which may enhance the propagation of an transmitted disease [17, 19, 42, 52, 53] .