Abstract
This paper examines the influence of socio-economic and cultural dimensions (measured at the country level) on what concerns people the most about the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on secondary data, the study considers the opinion of more than 24,000 individuals living in 30 different countries, with national samples weighted to match each country’s general population older than 18years of age. A set of linear Bayesian regressions was applied to 10 different types of worries reported for economic, health, and safety domains. Results demonstrate that socio-economic variables and cultural dimensions complement each other in explaining people’s concerns about the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. An overall view of the analysis also reveals that cultural dimensions exceed socio-economic variables in explaining peoples’ worries about health and safety domains. Socio-economic variables are slightly more effective in explaining the worries of the economic domain. Among the cultural dimensions, long-term orientation and uncertainty avoidance are the best in explaining people’s worries. The higher the score in long-term orientation, the lower the worry levels expressed by the respondents. Likewise, low scores on uncertainty avoidance generate lower levels of worries due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Finally, health worries produce a positive outcome because they explain a significant reduction in the fatality rate.
Highlights
Worry is a normal phenomenon that affects us all, but probably what we are living through today is by far the most important worry our society has seen during our life span
Results are presented based on the Bayesian regressions for each of the dependent variables used to measure worries or concerns in samples from the 30 countries
The measures of goodness of fit are satisfactory, the measure of R2 is at an adequate level, and the factor of Bayes >100 indicates that the robustness of the information in the sample supports the proposed model decisively
Summary
Worry is a normal phenomenon that affects us all, but probably what we are living through today is by far the most important worry our society has seen during our life span. Since December 2019, Covid-19 has infected and killed millions of people around the world. This new reality is causing individuals to be worried about their own circumstances and that of many others around them. A worry has been defined as a disturbing cognition that a state of an object (i.e., my personal health, my country’s economic situation, etc.) in some domain of life (i.e., health, economic, social relations, etc.) will become discrepant from it desired state (Boehnke et al, 1998).
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