Fear of COVID‐19 contagion and consumption: Evidence from a survey of Italian households (original) (raw)
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How Covid-19 changed economic and health-related worries in Italy
SN Business & Economics, 2022
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge challenge for governments all over the world, as well as for the World Health Organization (WHO) and the pharmaceutical companies in charge of creating the vaccines against the coronavirus. The success of all the efforts and the measures put in place to contain the spread of the contagion and to immunize people, however, also depends on people social compliance. In this study, we thus investigate how demographic and socioeconomic variables affected individuals' economic and health-related worries due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using questions created by the WHO, we surveyed about 3000 Italians between May and June 2020. Our results show that individuals' socio-demographic and socioeconomic characteristics are engaged with distinct types of worries due to Covid-19, such as health-related worries, economic-related worries and worries connected to restrictions on movements. Our findings have implications for decision makers and policy makers in showing how important is to consider demographic and socioeconomic differences between individuals, to better understand how people are differently affected by different worries and which actions and policies may be more effective in protecting and supporting people especially the most vulnerable ones.
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THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY AND CONSUMPTION PREFERENCES: AN INTERNATIONAL SURVEY
THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY AND CONSUMPTION PREFERENCES: AN INTERNATIONAL SURVEY
This study examines the effects of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on the household economy and consumer preferences between goods and services. Together with many other effects, this pandemic increased panic, anxiety, and depression level in both teenagers and adult people. This study covers the period from January 01 to May 2020. In this study, the attitudes of families in terms of food consumption and shopping preferences towards the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and lockdown were examined. Along with the secondary sources of data, the questionnaire technique is used as the primary resource. The questionnaire was conducted during the lockdown period of COVID-19 when all participants were self-isolated at home. The research found out that the pandemic caused increasing unemployment, decreased household income, and decreased the consumption of luxury and semi-luxury commodities. Before the disease, the first and second preferences for food consumption were meat and bakery foods, but during the pandemic, the first and second preferences were fruits and vegetables.
THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON HOUSEHOLD INCOME, CONSUMPTION, AND SAVING
Corporate & Business Strategy Review, 2023
The primary factors that were initially assumed to contribute to a decline in household income were job losses, which affect the decrease in consumption (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2020; Doerr & Gambacorta, 2020). Kosovo’s government has taken measures of social distancing, having a major impact on households such as the impact of dismissal due to the closure of businesses indefinitely. This regime is continuing from the different waves of COVID-19 variants and the family income as it goes and decreases. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on household income including household consumption and savings for the years 2020–2021. The study uses a quantitative research method, thus, for primary data collection, the online questionnaire is used. The latent variable in this paper is the COVID-19 pandemic, while the factors that determine the latent variable are: savings, job loss, family income before the pandemic, and consumption expenditures. The study concludes that COVID-19 has a negative and significant impact on family income, saving, job loss, and consumption expenditures. The results from the structural equation modeling (SEM) are significant and the likelihood ratio (LR) test is 47.46. These findings and those of Martin, Hallegatte, and Walsh (2020), Dossche, Kolndrekaj, and Slacalek (2021), and Bundervoet, Davalos, and Garcia (2021) are consistent.
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The COVID-19 vaccination drive raises questions about the trajectory of the economic recovery and the pandemic's impact on consumers' longer-term behaviors. In this Commentary, we examine the evolution of consumers' expectations for their post-crisis spending on services that have been dramatically curtailed by the pandemic: visiting restaurants, bars, and hotels, using public transportation, and attending crowded events. We document a U-shaped pattern of expected future use of these services, with growing pessimism in summer 2020 that had largely reversed by fall 2020-for most groups. More recently, higher-income individuals have indicated that they expect to sharply increase their use of these services compared with their pre-pandemic behaviors, but there has been a notable scarring of expectations among older Americans.
Pandemic Buying: COVID-19 and Purchasing Behaviour of French Households
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In this study, we use comprehensive French consumer data from the Nielsen ScanTrack retailer panel to analyse the progression of purchasing trends of French households during the coronavirus outbreak. Our results are threefold: First, we observe three temporal phases, namely the normal (pre-Covid-19) period, the anticipation period, and the lockdown period. During the three weeks of anticipation (24 February-15 March), sales of basic and cleaning products increased by 17%. The first week of the preventive lockdown saw panic buying with sales jumping by 30%, followed by a more subdued growth during the subsequent weeks of the lockdown. We found these time trends to be similar to those observed in Italy and Spain. Second, sales of the hypermarkets fell by 6% during the lockdown, while those of supermarkets and convenience stores rose by 13% and 28% respectively. Online sales through drive stores (80%) and home delivery (93%) showed the highest growth. Covid-19 appears to have accentuated the joint evolution of two major phenomena: strong development of E-commerce, and the desire of the households to visit small shops close to their homes. Third, in terms of product categories, we observe an increase in basic, easy-to-store food products, an increasing consumption of fresh, local & organic products, a significant increase in the purchase of basic hygiene products, and a decline in the purchase of cosmetics. In the latter case, Covid-19 seems to have accentuated a fundamental trend in household purchases in France: "eat local".
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The Impact of COVID-19 in Household Finance
The strict isolation-driven lockdown measures have inferred noteworthy limitations to social intuitive and financial movement. Whereas the length of this lockdown and the coming about in general scope of financial suggestions are profoundly dubious at this point. The length uncertainty and awareness of a non-secure financial definition for a household, determine actions and decisions around the world. This article reviews some important literature written after COVID-19 started to spread, how consumption and spending respond to the pandemic, and in general the economic effects of the outbreak.
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We analyse the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on the economic situation of 50+ Europeans. We construct a financial distress indicator that captures experiencing an income loss, difficulties to make ends meet and the need to postpone payments. We find that education and income before the pandemic have a protective role, and so does being past retirement age. For households under retirement age, instead, the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities. We also investigate whether households report worse difficulties in making ends meet compared to the pre-COVID period. We show that their ability to make ends meet worsens more with income losses during the pandemic compared to losses experienced in the two-year period before the pandemic.
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