Should the Timing of Covid-19 Restrictions be Determined by Country Characteristics? A Global Cross-Country Analysis

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic was declared on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization. Previous studies on viral diseases have suggested that the socioeconomic factors of countries can provide an explanation for which countries are more susceptible to Covid-19 infection cases. Our objective in this study was to determine whether this is the case, and whether the factors of importance change during different stages of the first year of the pandemic. We believed investigating this would provide important information to policymakers as containment measures should be implemented when a country is susceptible to more cases. We investigated this using a two-step procedure, where the first step was a panel data analysis of the number of cases and the second step was a crosscountry analysis of the socioeconomic factors. We find that socioeconomic factors can explain a country’s susceptibility to a higher number of infections, and these factors do in fact differ during the various periods of the pandemic. Our key results are that countries with developed economies are more susceptible in the early stage of the pandemic, while countries with more inequality become susceptible after the former countries have gained control of the virus. We conclude that policymakers should, when facing a pandemic of a virus transmitted in a similar way to Covid-19, consider the characteristics of their country and time their policy implementation accordingly.