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

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 as in Europe. Africa and America are still facing serious challenges in terms of managing the spread of the virus and reducing the death rate. In Africa, the rate of the spread of the virus is slower and the death rate is also lower than those of the other regions. By comparing the performances of different countries, our results on the performance of different countries in managing the speed of the virus agree with Gu et al. (2020). For example, both studies 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.