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Benford’s Law: Analysis of the trustworthiness of COVID-19 reporting in the context of different political regimes

In order for governments and demographers to, among other things, design policies and pensionplans, as well as for insurance companies to offer policies that serve general public, having reliable mortality data plays a crucial role. The academic world works actively in developing tools (models and methods) that can, based on collected mortality data, forecast future death rates in the observed population. Obviously, to be able to rely on the predicated data one needs a reliable source of existing mortality data. In the light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, reliability of certain death-case reporting has been questioned. In this thesis, the Benford’s Law is used to evaluate how well countries with authoritarian regimes (Azerbaijan, Belarus),and with democratic regimes (Greece, Serbia, Sweden), report their COVID-19 cases to theworldwide public. Statistical tests such as the Chi-squared test, mean absolute deviation, and the distribution distance were used to obtain the results needed to form our conclusions. During our testing, we found that countries with democratic regimes do conform better to the Benford’s law than the authoritarian ones.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mdh-54560
Date January 2021
CreatorsBurlac, Leonid, Giannakis, Nikolaos
PublisherMälardalens högskola, Akademin för utbildning, kultur och kommunikation, Mälardalens högskola, Akademin för utbildning, kultur och kommunikation
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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