Covid-19’s economic toll in the developing world | Vox

Vox highlights the results of a recent study by CEGA Faculty Director and co-authors, which demonstrated the staggering effects COVID-19 has had on food security and income accross the developing world:

“A new paper aims to solve that problem in the most direct way possible — by surveying tens of thousands of people in developing countries about what Covid-19 has been like for them. The paper, by UC Berkeley’s Edward Miguel and UC Berkeley and the World Bank’s Dennis Egger along with more than a dozen co-authors, published Friday in Science Advances, gives us a new window into what it has been like to live through 2020 in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

In short: It’s been awful.

Across the 16 areas surveyed (in some countries multiple areas were surveyed), a median of 70 percent of households reported a drop in income. Forty-five percent were forced to miss or reduce meals. Only 11 percent were able to access relief aid of any kind from governments or NGOs, and in some communities, it was zero percent. Measures of economic activity like business income suggest that in some areas, it dropped by half.”

Source: Covid-19’s economic toll in the developing world