Quantifying the Economic Impact of COVID-19 in Mainland China Using Human Mobility Data

Jizhou Huang, Haifeng Wang, Haoyi Xiong, Miao Fan, An Zhuo, Ying Li and Dejing Dou

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: To contain the pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Mainland China, the authorities have put in place a series of measures, including quarantines, social distancing, and travel restrictions. While these strategies have effectively dealt with the critical situations of outbreaks, the combination of the pandemic and mobility controls has slowed China's economic growth, resulting in the first quarterly decline of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since GDP began to be calculated, in 1992. To characterize the potential shrinkage of the domestic economy, from the perspective of mobility, we propose two new economic indicators: the New Venues Created (NVC) and the Volumes of Visits to Venue (V^3), as the complementary measures to domestic investments and consumption activities, using the data of Baidu Maps. The historical records of these two indicators demonstrated strong correlations with the past figures of Chinese GDP, while the status quo has dramatically changed this year, due to the pandemic. We hereby presented a quantitative analysis to project the impact of the pandemic on economies, using the recent trends of NVC and V^3. We found that the most affected sectors would be travel-dependent businesses, such as hotels, educational institutes, and public transportation, while the sectors that are mandatory to human life, such as workplaces, residential areas, restaurants, and shopping sites, have been recovering rapidly. Analysis at the provincial level showed that the self-sufficient and self-sustainable economic regions, with internal supplies, production, and consumption, have recovered faster than those regions relying on global supply chains.

Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.03010 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2005.03010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().