Economic and social consequences of human mobility restrictions under COVID-19

By G. Bonaccorsi, Francesco Pierri, Matteo Cinelli, Francesco Porcelli, Alessandro Galeazzi, Andrea Flori, Ana Lucía Schmidt, Carlo Michele Valensise, Antonio Scala, Walter Quattrociocchi and 1 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020

942 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the impact of lockdown measures introduced in response to the spread of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on socioeconomic conditions of Italian citizens. We leverage a massive near–real-time dataset of human mobility and we model mobility restrictions as an exogenous shock to the economy, similar to a natural disaster. We find that lockdown measures have a twofold effect: First, their impact on mobility is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity; second, they induce a segregation effect: mobility contraction is stronger in municipalities where inequality is higher and income per capita is lower. We highlight the necessity of fiscal measures that account for these effects, targeting poverty and inequality mitigation. In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, several national governments have applied lockdown restrictions to reduce the infection rate. Here we perform a massive analysis on near–real-time Italian mobility data provided by Facebook to investigate how lockdown strategies affect economic conditions of individuals and local governments. We model the change in mobility as an exogenous shock similar to a natural disaster. We identify two ways through which mobility restrictions affect Italian citizens. First, we find that the impact of lockdown is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity. Second, we find evidence of a segregation effect, since mobility contraction is stronger in municipalities in which inequality is higher and for those where individuals have lower income per capita. Our results highlight both the social costs of lockdown and a challenge of unprecedented intensity: On the one hand, the crisis is inducing a sharp reduction of fiscal revenues for both national and local governments; on the other hand, a significant fiscal effort is needed to sustain the most fragile individuals and to mitigate the increase in poverty and inequality induced by the lockdown.

Subfields: Modeling and Simulation, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18b0c039050199818a6d4a29eeb101c283d13139

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Citations in the corpus

Non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: A review (2020, neutral): “Measuring NPIs with proxy data 88 159 2 1 [37], 2 [38], 3 [39]”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, background): “Last, Bonaccorsi et al. (2020) analyze the heterogeneous impacts of lockdowns by socioeconomic conditions of people in Italy.”
Decline in Mobility: Public Transport in Poland in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Similar results are also obtained a by Queiroz et al. (2020) and Bonaccorsi et al. (2020) who, based on regional analysis, observe the reduction in the circulation of people in most neighbourhoods after government social distancing policies implementation.”