Over the course of history, the economic development levels of core nations, which are the industrialized and capitalist nations of the world system, have come by virtue of globalization processes and state interdependencies. However, amidst the current pandemic, one of the main factors that is helping to curb the spread of COVID-19 is anti-globalization. In peripheral and developing regions that embody large rural geographies, where social distancing is already a way of life, citizens of these regions are noted to be at a lower risk of infection (Baragona, 2020). Currently demands for self-isolation have already eliminated years of economic growth. COVID-19 has, essentially, inflicted significfant economic strains for most core, or developed, nations. On the contrary, peripheral states, or poor, underdeveloped nations whereby most households engage in subsistence lifestyles, are actually experiencing an advantage with regards to their responses to the disease. According to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinaon, exogeneity tends to incur a higher risk of disease and infectivity due to geographical and climate differences in certain regions, and that some regions and parts of the world have higher risk of disease in comparison with other geographical locales (Acemoglu et al., 2000). However, this notion is completely unrelated to the factors that have direct influences on GDP. In actuality, the spread of COVID-19 is more related to labor mobility and interstate dependency (Acemoglu et al., 2000). One of the causes for this has been the cross-border labor and resource mobility that determines the reach of the pandemic (Baragona, 2020). As such, it has come to light how imperative domestic institutional capabilities and import substitution are for coping with the prevailing supply and drug shortages currently being experienced and for effectively slowing the spread of COVID-19.