Are Vaccinations Alone Enough to Curb the Dynamics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the European Union?

Abstract

I use the data on the COVID-19 pandemic maintained by Our Word in Data to estimate a nonstationary dynamic panel exhibiting the dynamics of confirmed deaths, infections and vaccinations per million population in the European Union countries in the period of January–July 2021. Having the data aggregated on a weekly basis I demonstrate that a model which allows for heterogeneous short-run dynamics and common long-run marginal effects is superior to that allowing only for either homogeneous or heterogeneous responses. The analysis shows that the long-run marginal death effects with respect to confirmed infections and vaccinations are positive and negative, respectively, as expected. Since the estimate of the former effect compared to the latter one is about 71.67 times greater, only mass vaccinations can prevent the number of deaths from being large in the long-run. The success in achieving this is easier for countries with the estimated large negative individual death effect (Cyprus, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, Estonia, Lithuania) than for those with the large but positive death effect (Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia). The speed of convergence to the long-run equilibrium relationship estimates for individual countries are all negative. For some countries (Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia) they differ in the magnitude from that averaged for the whole EU, while for others (Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain), they do not.