Poverty and COVID-19 in Africa and Latin America
Olivier Bargain and
Ulugbek Aminjonov
Post-Print from HAL
Abstract:
Since March 2020, governments have recommended or enacted lockdown policies to curb the spread of COVID-19. Yet, poorer segments of the population cannot afford to stay at home and must continue to work. In this paper, we test whether work-related mobility is effectively influenced by the local intensity of poverty. To do so, we exploit poverty data and Google mobility data for 242 regions of nine Latin American and African countries. We find that the drop in work-related mobility during the first lockdown period was indeed significantly lower in high-poverty regions compared to other regions. We also illustrate how higher poverty has induced a faster spread of the virus. The policy implication is that social protection measures in the form of food or cash trasfers must be complementary to physical distancing measures. Further research must evaluate how such transfers, when implemented, have attenuated the difference between poor and non-poor regions in terms of exposure to the virus.
Keywords: COVID-19; Poverty; Lockdown; Compliance; Work mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03683517
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)
Published in World Development, 2021, pp.105422. ⟨10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105422⟩
Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03683517/document (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Poverty and COVID-19 in Africa and Latin America (2021) 
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:hal:journl:hal-03683517
DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105422
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().