Socio-Economic and Demographic Factors Associated with COVID-19 Mortality in European Regions: Spatial Econometric Analysis

In some NUTS 2 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) regions of Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an increase in mortality by several dozen percent and only a few percent in others. Based on the data on 189 regions from 19 European countries, we identified factors responsible for these differences, both intra- and internationally. Due to the spatial nature of the virus diffusion and to account for unobservable country-level and sub-national characteristics, we used spatial econometric tools to estimate two types of models, explaining (i) the number of cases per 10,000 inhabitants and (ii) the percentage increase in the number of deaths compared to the 2016–2019 average in individual regions (mostly NUTS 2) in 2020. We used two weight matrices simultaneously, accounting for both types of spatial autocorrelation: linked to geographical proximity and adherence to the same country. For the feature selection, we used Bayesian Model Averaging. The number of reported cases is negatively correlated with the share of risk groups in the population (60+ years old, older people reporting chronic lower respiratory disease, and high blood pressure) and the level of society’s belief that the positive health effects of restrictions outweighed the economic losses. Furthermore, it positively correlated with GDP per capita (PPS) and the percentage of people employed in the industry. On the contrary, the mortality (per number of infections) has been limited through high-quality healthcare. Additionally, we noticed that the later the pandemic first hit a region, the lower the death toll there was, even controlling for the number of infections.