The magnitude of the coronavirus disease pandemic has an enormous impact on the social life and the economic activities in almost every country in the world. Besides the biological and epidemiological factors, a multitude of social and economic criteria also govern the extent of the coronavirus disease spread in the population. Consequently, there is an active debate regarding the critical socio-economic determinants that contribute to the resulting pandemic. In this paper, we contribute towards the resolution of the debate by leveraging Bayesian model averaging techniques and country level data to investigate the potential of 35 determinants, describing a diverse set of socio-economic characteristics, in explaining the coronavirus pandemic outcome. * This is a preliminary report which includes data gathered up to 11th April 2020. It will be updated weekly so as to only include results based on data that is not older than two weeks.

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The initial period of vaccination shows strong heterogeneity between countries’ vaccinations rollout, both in the terms of the start of the vaccination process and in the dynamics of the number of people that are vaccinated. A predominant thesis for this observation is that a key determinant of the swift and extensive vaccine rollout is state capacity. Here, we utilize two measures that quantify different aspects of the state capacity: (i) the external capacity (measured through the soft power of the country) and (ii) the internal capacity (measured via the country’s government effectiveness) and provide an empirical test for their relationship with the coronavirus vaccination outcome in the initial period (up to 31st March 2021). By using data on 128 countries and a two-step Heckman approach, we find that the soft power is a robust determinant of whether a country has started with the vaccination process. In addition, the government effectiveness is a key factor that determines vaccine roll-out. Altogether, our findings are in line with the hypothesis that state capacity determines the observed heterogeneity between countries in the initial period of COVID-19 vaccines rollout. As such, they are a stark reminder for the need for transparent and fair global response regarding fair and equitable availability of vaccines to every country.