Elena Ciochina

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Coordinated public information campaigns became a near-universal instrument of pandemic crisis communication, while the internet penetration of their audiences ranged from under 3 percent to full coverage. The study examines whether the association between campaign intensity and the pace of vaccination uptake varies with pre-pandemic internet penetration, a contextual marker of the digital environment rather than campaign exposure. Using a global country-month panel of 168 economies over 2021–2022 (N = 3,410), it estimates two-way fixed-effects models with country-clustered standard errors, drawing campaign intensity from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and fixing connectivity at its 2019 level. The interaction between campaigns and internet penetration is positive and robust (0.912, p < 0.001): a standard deviation of baseline penetration, 27.9 percentage points, raises the campaign–uptake slope by about 0.9 points per month. The marginal association is significantly negative at low connectivity (−1.955 at the tenth percentile, p < 0.001), indistinguishable from zero at the median (−0.289) and the ninetieth percentile (+0.501), with the confidence band excluding zero only below roughly 62 percent penetration; the firm result is the negative association under low connectivity. The pattern survives winsorizing, one-month lagging, separate estimation for 2021 and 2022, and vaccination-policy controls, yet baseline connectivity correlates with income and governance at r = 0.77–0.90, so the moderation indexes a development bundle of which connectivity is one legible marker. The illustrative cases of Moldova and Armenia, comparably connected yet facing contrasting overlapping crises, show connectivity alone does not assure uptake where parallel emergencies compete for attention.

Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the financial support received for the implementation of the project “Accelerating the Digital and Green Transformation of Agri-Food SMEs in Moldova and Armenia”, funded by the National Agency for Research and Development of the Republic of Moldova (NARD) (Project No. 26.80013.0807.05ARM) and the Higher Education and Science Committee of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of the Republic of Armenia (Project No. 26NARD-1D007).