## Leveraging Opportunities from COVID-19 Vaccines: Early Lessons from Asia

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**Canonical URL:** [Leveraging Opportunities from COVID-19 Vaccines: Early Lessons from Asia](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/oap/oap-home/2021/apdreo-chapter-3-vaccine-presentation.pdf)

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### Vaccine deployment in Asia
- Presentation by the IMF Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, NOVEMBER 10, 2021.
- Vaccinations tracked as vaccines administered per 100 population (simple averages) across regions and income groups (figures use Our World in Data).
- Vaccine procurement tracked as confirmed orders, potential orders, and donations per 100 population (figures use Duke University Health Innovation Center and other sources).
- Data sources assembled for empirical analysis include:
  - Daily vaccination, health and containment data (COVID-19 cases, ICU admissions, deaths; vaccinations administered and procured; government responses).
  - High frequency economic indicators (NO2 emissions).
  - COVID variants, vaccine source (domestic production), vaccine acceptance, health infrastructure, geographic and economic proximity.

### Determinants of vaccine rollout
- Empirical strategy:
  - Cross-sectional variation exploited to assess demand and supply side factors in vaccination rollout using OLS with robust standard errors (equation (1)).
  - Supply-side factors: early procurement of vaccines; domestic production; health infrastructure.
  - Demand-side factors: scale of the pandemic before the vaccination rollout; vaccine acceptance by population.
  - Univariate regressions to identify significant factors; multivariate regressions to estimate relative importance.
- Key quantified drivers (impact measured as effect of a 1 standard deviation change in factor on vaccinations per 100 population):
  - Cumulative cases (end-2020): positive effect.
  - Vaccine procurement (Jan 2021): large positive effect.
  - Health index: positive effect.
  - Domestic production: positive effect.
  - Vaccine acceptance (Jan 2021): positive effect.
- Robustness checks:
  - Alternate measures of COVID-19 impact (latest caseload as of June 20, 2021; average daily confirmed cases in 2020; peak daily cases; measures based on deaths).
  - Alternate procurement measures (confirmed vs potential orders), procurement timing (October 2020, latest available), and data sources (Airfinity vs Duke).
  - Alternate health infrastructure measures (GHS Index, doctors per capita, hospital beds per capita).
  - Alternate pace-of-rollout metrics (average daily vaccinations).

### Effect of COVID-19 vaccines on health and economic outcomes
- Identification approach:
  - High-frequency (daily) country-time panel to identify vaccination impacts; mitigates reverse causality using lags and country fixed effects; controls for mobility and NPIs; time fixed effects for global factors (equation (2)).
  - Explored heterogeneous effects via interactions (equation (3)), smooth transition specification (equations (4)), and semi-parametric quartile specification (equation (5)).
- Health outcomes:
  - Reported daily effect of a 20 ppt increase in administration of a first COVID-19 dose per capita on health outcomes per capita measured 21 days after administration (source: Deb et al. (2021a)).
  - Vaccination reduces new COVID-19 cases, new ICU admissions, and new COVID-19 fatalities with effects evaluated at 21 days.
  - Impact depends on initial country conditions: larger effects when containment measures are higher and when the severity of the outbreak is higher (red/green bar comparisons for containment and outbreak severity).
- Addressing endogeneity:
  - Introduce "vaccine surprises" defined as the difference between actual vaccination rates and expected vaccination rates (Airfinity, Our World in Data, IMF staff calculations).
  - Vaccine surprises are less likely endogenous to economic developments and COVID-19 trends, improving causal identification.
- Economic outcomes (short-run high-frequency indicator):
  - Vaccination first doses, second doses, and vaccine surprises affect NO2 emissions (used as a proxy for economic activity).
  - Effects reported as percent of the population impact on NO2 emissions after 1 day (source: Deb et al. (2021b)).
  - Vaccine surprises show larger and more immediate associations with increases in NO2 emissions than expected vaccinations.
  - Heterogeneous effects across country quartiles: first through fourth quartile effects shown separately; statistical significance at 90 percent level indicated by shading.

### Spillovers from COVID-19 cases and vaccines
- Methodology for spillovers:
  - Construct weighted measures of neighboring countries’ COVID-19 cases and vaccinations using bilateral distance or trade weights w_{i,j} (weights sum to 1 for j ≠ i) and include these terms in the panel framework (equations (6) and (7)).
  - Estimate with OLS and standard errors clustered at the country level.
- Findings:
  - Outbreaks and vaccination progress in partner countries affect a country’s own COVID-19 caseload and economic outcomes.
  - Timing of variant spread: days elapsed until the Delta variant reached 50 percent of COVID-19 cases computed relative to India (April 19 2021) for regions (GISAID, CoVariants.org).
  - Regional vaccine acceptance measured in January 2021 (University of Maryland Global COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey in partnership with Facebook) varies across regions.
  - Neighboring COVID-19 cases and neighboring COVID-19 vaccinations both show measurable effects on a country’s own COVID-19 cases and NO2 emissions (figures report effects as % of population; NO2 emissions as % of population on RHS).

### Conclusions and policy implications
- Swift and efficient vaccine deployment is crucial in reducing the spread of the coronavirus and securing a global recovery (IMF Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific).
- Concurrent social distancing measures in countries most affected by outbreaks yield long-term economic gains.
- Larger vaccine effects on health outcomes can shorten the pandemic duration and offset short-term costs of social distancing.
- Global cooperation is essential: until all countries have effectively vaccinated and controlled the pandemic, no country is safe.

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/oap/oap-home/2021/apdreo-chapter-3-vaccine-presentation.pdf_