COVID-19: Effectiveness of Socioeconomic Factors in Containing the Spread and Mortality

This paper presents a study on 80 countries that evaluates the socioeconomic factors in containing the spread and mortality of COVID-19 pandemic with the countries whose infection and death cases are more than 30 days after the 10th case being reported. Our results show that the long-term social factors such as lower personal freedom, better education in science, and past coronavirus outbreak experience are more effective than the economic factors such as higher healthcare-associated factors per 1000 population and larger GDP. However, using GDP per capita as the instrumental variable, we also find that the richer countries with a high degree of personal freedom have a higher number of infection or death cases per million population because they would be less likely to adhere to and implement the policy of the movement restrictions to restrict their access to goods and services since they have more income to spend to maintain their higher expected utility from consumption.