April 27, 2020 – Is there a way to gauge how much the COVID-19 pandemic is going to affect an individual economy? Conceptually, you could argue that economies experiencing tighter social distancing may also experience more negative shocks in their domestic sectors. Collecting that data across economies could provide some insights into the comparative degree of impact in different regions.
To gauge the degree of social distancing in a country, we summarize data on mobility provided by both Google and Apple. These reports provide people’s frequency of visits and length of stay at categorized places compared to a baseline of ‘normal’ from earlier this year.
As of April 17th, Africa/Mideast and Eurozone were under tighter social distancing than Latin America, EM Asia ex-China and EM Europe. We see mild social distancing in Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong.
Click here to view the report in full.