Davies James B
Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
Can Public Policy. 2021 Dec 1;47(4):537-553. doi: 10.3138/cpp.2021-033.
The cross-country relationship of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) case and death rates with previously measured income inequality and poverty in the pandemic's first wave is studied, controlling for other underlying factors, in a worldwide sample of countries. If the estimated associations are interpreted as causal, the Gini coefficient for income has a significant positive effect on both cases and deaths per capita in regressions using the full sample and for cases but not for deaths when Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD sub-samples are treated separately. The Gini coefficient for wealth has a significant positive effect on cases, but not on deaths, in both sub-samples and in the full sample. Poverty generally has weak positive effects in the full and non-OECD samples, but a relative poverty measure has a strong positive effect on cases in the OECD sample. Analysis of the gap between COVID-19 first-wave cases and deaths per capita in Canada and the higher rates in the United States indicates that 37 percent of the cases gap and 28 percent of the deaths gap could be attributed to the higher-income Gini in the United States according to the full-sample regressions.
在一个全球国家样本中，研究了2019冠状病毒病（COVID-19）病例和死亡率与疫情第一波期间先前测量的收入不平等和贫困之间的跨国关系，并对其他潜在因素进行了控制。如果将估计的关联解释为因果关系，那么在使用全样本的回归中，收入基尼系数对人均病例数和死亡数均有显著的正向影响；在分别处理经济合作与发展组织（OECD）和非OECD子样本时，收入基尼系数对病例数有显著正向影响，但对死亡数没有。财富基尼系数在两个子样本和全样本中对病例数有显著正向影响，但对死亡数没有。贫困在全样本和非OECD样本中通常有微弱的正向影响，但一项相对贫困指标在OECD样本中对病例数有强烈的正向影响。对加拿大COVID-19第一波病例和人均死亡数与美国较高比率之间差距的分析表明，根据全样本回归，病例数差距的37%和死亡数差距的28%可归因于美国较高的收入基尼系数。
