Abstract
This paper aims to study the impact of average R&D spending on COVID-19 mortality rate by country. I would like to know whether an increase in R&D as a percentage of GDP in a given country has a significant impact on the mortality rate of the country in question, which has not been examined so far. The premise is that countries that invest in R&D give more weight to the input of scientists when making policy. Additionally, such countries should be more capable of adapting quickly to the new conditions imposed by the pandemic, and thus should have a lower mortality rate. Regressing mortality on our variable of interest using OLS yields that R&D spending is insignificant. However, by using the number of published research papers per year as an instrument for R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, it is possible to eliminate endogeneity. I surprisingly found that an opposite relationship exists.