On the Time Trend of COVID-19: A Panel Data Study

TL;DR

This study analyzes COVID-19 trends across countries using econometric tools, highlighting regional differences in curve flattening and identifying factors influencing virus spread and mortality.

Contribution

It applies econometric methods to COVID-19 data at the country level, providing comparative insights into regional performance and virus management effectiveness.

Findings

European countries flatten curves more effectively

Asia & Oceania show moderate success

Africa and America face greater challenges

Abstract

In this paper, we study the trending behaviour of COVID-19 data at country level, and draw attention to some existing econometric tools which are potentially helpful to understand the trend better in future studies. In our empirical study, we find that European countries overall flatten the curves more effectively compared to the other regions, while Asia & Oceania also achieve some success, but the situations are not as optimistic elsewhere. Africa and America are still facing serious challenges in terms of managing the spread of the virus, and reducing the death rate, although in Africa the virus spreads slower and has a lower death rate than the other regions. By comparing the performances of different countries, our results incidentally agree with Gu et al. (2020), though different approaches and models are considered. For example, both works agree that countries such as USA, UK and Italy perform relatively poorly; on the other hand, Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore perform relatively better.