Publication: Inequality under COVID-19: Taking Stock of High-Frequency Data for East Asia and the Pacific
Loading...
Date
2021-11
ISSN
Published
2021-11
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
While the distributional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been well-documented in high-income countries, studies in low- and middle-income countries have been relatively rare due to data limitations. This paper uses pre-pandemic household welfare data and high-frequency household phone survey data from seven middle-income countries in East Asia and the Pacific, spanning May 2020 to May 2021, to analyze the distributional impacts of the pandemic and their implications for equitable recovery. The results indicate that employment impacts at the extensive margin have been large and widespread across the welfare distribution during times of stringent mobility restrictions (low mobility). When mobility restrictions have been relaxed, however, employment impacts have been larger among poorer workers who have found it more difficult to return to employment. Data on the loss of labor income also suggests that the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities. In addition to being more susceptible to employment and income shocks, poorer households in East Asia and the Pacific are at higher risk of experiencing long-term scarring from the pandemic – due to rising food insecurity, increased debt, distress sale of assets, and fewer distance/interactive learning opportunities for their children. Taken together, the findings indicate that inequality has worsened during the pandemic, raising concerns about the prospects for an inclusive recovery in the absence of appropriate policy measures.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Kim, Lydia Y.; Lugo, Maria Ana; Mason, Andrew D.; Uochi, Ikuko. 2021. Inequality under COVID-19: Taking Stock of High-Frequency Data for East Asia and the Pacific. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9859. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36635 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication The Short-Term Impacts of COVID-19 on Households in Developing Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03)This paper combines new data from high-frequency surveys with data on the stringency of containment measures to examine the short-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on households in developing countries. This paper is one of the first to document the impacts of COVID-19 on households across a large number of developing countries and to do so for a comparable time-period, corresponding to the peak of the pandemic-induced drop in human mobility, and the first to systematically analyze the cross- and within-country effects on employment, income, food security, and learning. Using representative data from 34 countries, accounting for a combined population of almost 1.4 billion, the findings show that in the average country, 36 percent of respondents stopped working in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, over 64 percent of households reported decreases in income, and over 30 percent of children were unable to continue learning during school closures. Pandemic-induced loss of jobs and income translated into heightened food insecurity at the household level. The more stringent the virus containment measures were, the higher was the likelihood of loss of jobs and income. The pandemic’s effects were widespread and highly regressive, disproportionately affecting vulnerable segments of the population. Women, youth, and lower-educated workers—groups disadvantaged in the labor market before the COVID-19 shock—were significantly more likely to lose their jobs and experience decreased incomes. Self-employed and casual workers—the most vulnerable workers in developing countries—bore the brunt of the pandemic- induced income losses. Interruptions in learning were most salient for children in lower-income countries, and within countries for children in lower-income households with lower-educated parents and in rural areas. The unequal impacts of the pandemic across socioeconomic groups risk cementing inequality of opportunity and undermining social mobility and call for policies to foster an inclusive recovery and strengthen resilience to future shocks.Publication Risks to Poverty, Vulnerability, and Inequality from COVID-19(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05-10)Nepal made significant progress on poverty and shared prosperity over the period 1996-2010, despite low domestic growth. With consistently high rates of vulnerability and exposure to a range of shocks, the risk of falling back into poverty has remained an enduring feature of the welfare narrative in Nepal. The past decade, from 2010 to 2020, has been characterized by a series of economic shocks that took place against a background of a prolonged political transition towards federalism in Nepal. These shocks were also correlated with declines in economic growth. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, which started in March 2020, is the latest in the series of economic shocks over the last decade which has adversely affected Nepal’s economy and labor market; and it is likely to have had adverse welfare effects. However, the lack of data on welfare dynamics during this period has made it difficult to track the impacts of these shocks on households, workers and firms. This light poverty assessment is organized as follows: Section 1 describes the data challenges, and highlights the evolution of measures of non-monetary welfare, pre-COVID; section 2 provides an overview of the impacts of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Nepal; and section 3 highlights the role of pre-existing vulnerabilities and structural issues in making the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis more costly to welfare in the short run, and in potentially deepening inequalities in the longer run.Publication Papua New Guinea High Frequency Phone Survey on COVID-19, December 2020 to January 2021(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021)This joint report by the World Bank and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Papua New Guinea (PNG) presents the findings from two mobile phone surveys conducted in December 2020 and January 2021 in PNG. The World Bank survey, conducted in December 2020, was the second in a series. The UNICEF survey, conducted in January 2021, targeted re-contacting all 2,534 households from the World Bank round 2 survey with children under the age of 15, and achieved a final sample of 2,449. These results were also weighted using information from the demographic and health survey (DHS) to develop representative estimates for households with children under 15, 79.8 percent according to the DHS. The UNICEF survey included sections on household impacts as well as on the children living within the household. Compared to the rest of the country, markedly higher shares of respondents in the NCD noted deteriorations since June in situations related to theft, alcohol, and drug abuse, intimidation by police, violence by police, and domestic abuse, as well as higher declines in overall community trust, which can be an indicator of rising tensions. In addition, there were potential warning signs of the impacts of the prolonged crisis on children, with more than one-third of children exhibiting negative behavioral changes in the previous 15 days - though again a lack of baseline data limits the ability to establish a causal link specifically with Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).Publication Monitoring COVID-19 Impacts on Households in Zambia, Report No. 1(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07-08)The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic and social effects on households have created an urgent need for timely data to help monitor and mitigate the social and economic impacts of the crisis and protect the welfare of the least well-off in Zambian society. To monitor how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting Zambia’s economy and people and to inform interventions and policy responses, the World Bank designed and conducted a rapid phone-based Household Monitoring Survey (HMS). This brief summarizes the results of the first round of the HMS, implemented between June 5 and June 26, 2020. The brief is based on a sample of 1,602 households in both urban and rural areas in all ten provinces of Zambia. The survey is representative at three levels: Lusaka, urban excluding Lusaka, and rural. The 25-minute questionnaire covers such topics as knowledge of COVID and mitigation measures, access to educational activities during school closures, employment dynamics, household income and livelihood, income loss and coping strategies, and assistance received.Publication COVID-19 and Economic Inequality(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01)This paper examines the short-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for inequality in developing countries. The analysis takes advantage of high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank to assess the distributional impacts of the pandemic through the channels of job and income losses, food insecurity, and children’s education in the early days of the pandemic and subsequent period of economic recovery leading up to early 2021. It also introduces a methodology for estimating changes in income inequality due to the pandemic by combining data from phone surveys, pre-pandemic household surveys, and macroeconomic projections of sectoral growth rates. The paper finds that the pandemic had dis-equalizing impacts both across and within countries. Even under the assumption of distribution-neutral impacts within countries, the projected income losses are estimated to be higher in the bottom half of the global income distribution. Within countries, disadvantaged groups were more likely to have experienced work and income losses initially and are recovering more slowly. Inequality simulations suggest an increase in the Gini index for 29 of 34 countries in the sample, with an average increase of about 1 percent. Although these short-term impacts on inequality appear to be small, they suggest that projections of global poverty and inequality impacts of COVID-19 under the assumption of distribution-neutral changes within countries are likely to underestimate actual impacts. Finally, the paper argues that the overall inequality impacts of COVID-19 could be larger over the medium-to-long term on account of a slow and uneven recovery in many developing countries, and disparities in learning losses during pandemic-related school closures, which will likely have long-lasting effects on inequality of opportunity and social mobility.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Media and Messages for Nutrition and Health(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the past decade. However, poor nutritional outcomes remain a concern. Rates of childhood undernutrition are particularly high in remote, rural, and upland areas. Media have the potential to play an important role in shaping health and nutrition–related behaviors and practices as well as in promoting sociocultural and economic development that might contribute to improved nutritional outcomes. This report presents the results of a media audit (MA) that was conducted to inform the development and production of mass media advocacy and communication strategies and materials with a focus on maternal and child health and nutrition that would reach the most people from the poorest communities in northern Lao PDR. Making more people aware of useful information, essential services and products and influencing them to use these effectively is the ultimate goal of mass media campaigns, and the MA measures the potential effectiveness of media efforts to reach this goal. The effectiveness of communication channels to deliver health and nutrition messages to target beneficiaries to ensure maximum reach and uptake can be viewed in terms of preferences, satisfaction, and trust. Overall, the four most accessed media channels for receiving information among communities in the study areas were village announcements, mobile phones, television, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Of the accessed media channels, the top three most preferred channels were village announcements (40 percent), television (26 percent), and mobile phones (19 percent). In terms of trust, village announcements were the most trusted source of information (64 percent), followed by mobile phones (14 percent) and television (11 percent). Hence of all the media channels, village announcements are the most preferred, have the most satisfied users, and are the most trusted source of information in study communities from four provinces in Lao PDR with some of the highest burden of childhood undernutrition.Publication South Asia Development Update, April 2024: Jobs for Resilience(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-02)South Asia is expected to continue to be the fastest-growing emerging market and developing economy (EMDE) region over the next two years. This is largely thanks to robust growth in India, but growth is also expected to pick up in most other South Asian economies. However, growth in the near-term is more reliant on the public sector than elsewhere, whereas private investment, in particular, continues to be weak. Efforts to rein in elevated debt, borrowing costs, and fiscal deficits may eventually weigh on growth and limit governments' ability to respond to increasingly frequent climate shocks. Yet, the provision of public goods is among the most effective strategies for climate adaptation. This is especially the case for households and farms, which tend to rely on shifting their efforts to non-agricultural jobs. These strategies are less effective forms of climate adaptation, in part because opportunities to move out of agriculture are limited by the region’s below-average employment ratios in the non-agricultural sector and for women. Because employment growth is falling short of working-age population growth, the region fails to fully capitalize on its demographic dividend. Vibrant, competitive firms are key to unlocking the demographic dividend, robust private investment, and workers’ ability to move out of agriculture. A range of policies could spur firm growth, including improved business climates and institutions, the removal of financial sector restrictions, and greater openness to trade and capital flows.Publication The Journey Ahead(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-31)The Journey Ahead: Supporting Successful Migration in Europe and Central Asia provides an in-depth analysis of international migration in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and the implications for policy making. By identifying challenges and opportunities associated with migration in the region, it aims to inform a more nuanced, evidencebased debate on the costs and benefits of cross-border mobility. Using data-driven insights and new analysis, the report shows that migration has been an engine of prosperity and has helped address some of ECA’s demographic and socioeconomic disparities. Yet, migration’s full economic potential remains untapped. The report identifies multiple barriers keeping migration from achieving its full potential. Crucially, it argues that policies in both origin and destination countries can help maximize the development impacts of migration and effectively manage the economic, social, and political costs. Drawing from a wide range of literature, country experiences, and novel analysis, The Journey Ahead presents actionable policy options to enhance the benefits of migration for destination and origin countries and migrants themselves. Some measures can be taken unilaterally by countries, whereas others require close bilateral or regional coordination. The recommendations are tailored to different types of migration— forced displacement as well as high-skilled and low-skilled economic migration—and from the perspectives of both sending and receiving countries. This report serves as a comprehensive resource for governments, development partners, and other stakeholders throughout Europe and Central Asia, where the richness and diversity of migration experiences provide valuable insights for policy makers in other regions of the world.Publication Economic Recovery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-06)World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.Publication Remarks at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-12)World Bank Group President David Malpass discussed biodiversity and climate change being closely interlinked, with terrestrial and marine ecosystems serving as critically important carbon sinks. At the same time climate change acts as a direct driver of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss. The World Bank has financed biodiversity conservation around the world, including over 116 million hectares of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas, 10 million hectares of Terrestrial Protected Areas, and over 300 protected habitats, biological buffer zones and reserves. The COVID pandemic, biodiversity loss, climate change are all reminders of how connected we are. The recovery from this pandemic is an opportunity to put in place more effective policies, institutions, and resources to address biodiversity loss.