How did residents and industries react to changing policies (restricting movement and economic activity) imposed during the peak of the second wave of COVID-19 in Maharashtra? Can such a question be answered when no traditional data sources are available?
Note: I’ve been invited to present this research at a World Bank Conference at LinkedIn HQ in San Francisco on October 28, 2022.
As part of being a Data Fellow at the World Bank, I attempted to answer this question using smartphone location data (provided by Outlogic) and satellite imagery (provided by SpaceKnow).
I had two main findings:
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Lead: The mobility of people changed in anticipation of a policy, not when the policy itself was enforced. If residents felt that lockdowns/restrictions were about to be imposed, they tended to move out of the area.
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Lag: Economic activity always took a week or two to react to a change in policy. Firm-level decisions, especially ones that drastically change operations such as shutting/restarting a factory do require time since there are multiple variables (labour and capital) that need to be figured out.
Maharashtra, one of the wealthiest states in India, was among the worst hit by COVID-19, registering nearly 140,000 COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic. India cannot afford Maharashtra being ill-prepared for future disasters due to its economic and social importance. Hence, the developed method highlights the efficacy of using alternative, granular and fast-frequency data from smartphones and satellite imagery to provide policymakers with real-time analysis which is often not available during an emergency. Quantifying the effects of government directives on movement and economic activity provides an understanding of future state interventions in similar situations.
Read my article describing the study, published on the World Bank website here.
Read the entire working paper here.