Health Risks and Country Sustainability: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Determining Cause-and-Effect Relationships and Their Transformations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This papers investigated the coronavirus pandemic as a health and safety risk factor for state sustainable development to examine the cause-and-effect relationships  between the key spheres of society's life: economic, financial-budgetary, political-institutional. Personally, I think there are some deficiencies that need to be further improved.

Question1#: The contribution of this paper is not clear enough, which it is better to elaborate in the revised manuscript.

Question2#: Please revise the abstract section to ensure that it includes the main conclusions of the research.

Question3#: A supplementary paragraph should be added to illustrate the reliability and robustness of the empirical model or to provide an indication of the reliability of the research model sufficient to draw the research conclusions.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Unfortunately, I don't see how the authors can unpack the cause-and-effect with the data that they use. The cross-sectional nature of the data are not suitable. And even if they could render the data as suitable cross-sectional time-series, the timeline would not be suitable given the 2017-2020 timeline. In fact, this is almost all pre-pandemic, so it is hard to believe that they can unpack the cause-and-effect of key variables on the pandemic with a cross-sectional in 2020 and others pre-pandemic.

Methodologically, there are several basic considerations that should have been addressed. Why those 59 countries? Why this time span? Why those indicators? For example, why not use the V-Dem index? There is no discussion at all on these fundamental methodological choices. Moreover, I still don't understand why canonical regressions specifically were needed. Please include titles on axis in Figure 1. 

A huge literature on economics and political institution from political science is missing. With this literature in mind, I fail to see a contribution when it comes to the link between the economy and political institutions.

I can't recommend an acceptance or a R&R. 

The scope seems way too ambitious and would benefit from being tighter and more adapted to the data that are used.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Please find my suggestion to increase the clarity and readability of the study.

Line 137: why only 59 countries as COVID-19 is worldwide pandemic? and moreover, authors should explain that the low number of years (2017-2020) has no biassnes regarding the results to interpret.

Line 177-187: why author preferred canonical regression, why authors not considered the cross-sectional dependency while countries are not independent from each other regarding their political and institutional development as well as economic development.

Although the authors made good attempt to present their results of the study steep wise, but there are some interconnections are missing. For example. In Line 245 “level of exports of goods” looks different what they used the variable sin analysis of economic development.  

Line 247-249: three variables of political and institutional development are explained having important/significant influence. how have Author described it just based on the variance value presented in table. if yes, then pol_stabil_2017 also can have significant influence based on it value = 0.2236.

Authors should improve their methodology by incorporating the basic criteria to interpret their result.  

Why numbers of indicators reduced in each dimension when SEM is to apply..

The discussion is very week that extensively needs to improve. The authors fails to link their result with the literature, as they presented in discussion part. It looks like the explanation of results not the discussion.

Line 391-392:is it possible to say that “political and institutional factors did not have such a strong influence on the economic sphere”.

Conclusion should be based on the results not the repetition of results like explained here.

What was the major research gap authors filled, it looks that they have done very new research as they explained their findings.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors were not responsive. For example, I asked why the authors include some indicators and not others, and the authors simply reply that they had to choose... 

I still believe that the manuscript is of quite low quality, mostly because it cannot do what it claims to do. 

Author Response

Remark 1. The authors were not responsive. For example, I asked why the authors include some indicators and not others, and the authors simply reply that they had to choose... 

Dear reviewer

We took into consideration your last comments on our article.

We reached our explanations for chosen indicators of all groups of determinants in rows 174-208 in the text of the article.