The informal economy at times of COVID-19 pandemic
Open accessAbstract
We provide a first view of vulnerable informal economy after the blows from COVID-19, using transaction-level business data of around 80 million offline micro businesses (OMBs) owners from the largest Fintech company in China and employing machine learning method for causal inference. We find that the OMBs activities in China experienced an immediate and dramatic drop of 50% during the trough. The businesses had rebounded to around 80% of where they should be seven weeks after the COVID-19 outbreak, but had remained at this level until the end of our time window. We find a larger disruption to the OMBs in urban areas, the female merchants and the merchants who were not grown up in the places where they conducted businesses. We discuss the implications for policy support to the most vulnerable, and highlight the importance to take full advantage of digital development to follow up the informal economy.
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Building sustainable human capital is a significant priority for tourism businesses, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Building a sustainable human capital is a significant priority for tourism businesses, particularly in the light of the current pandemic of Covid-19 (Hossain, 2021;Guo et al., 2022).”
From Well-being Human Resource Model In The Collaborative Economy: The Keystone of ESG Strategy In The Tourism Sector (2023) · cites this paper as Guo et al., 2022
The Conclusions and implications section recommends continued support for vulnerable informal workers during COVID-19. A search for tourism businesses and sustainable human capital found no passage addressing either as a business priority; the paper’s discussion of worker support does not establish the attributed claim. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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Ragazou, K., Garefalakis, A., Papademetriou, C., & Passas, I. (2023) · International Conference on Tourism Research · doi:10.34190/ictr.6.1.1066 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
- Authors
- Guo, F., Huang, Y., Wang, J., & Wang, X.
- Affiliations
- Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (CN)
- Peking University (CN)
- Central University of Finance and Economics (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Wang, Xue
- Venue
- China Economic Review
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2022-02
- Volume
- 71
- Pages
- 101722
- ISSN
- 1043-951X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8609671
- OpenAlex
- W3215830253
- Cited by
- 61
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 14 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 8.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- Locations
- China Economic Review (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Taxation and Compliance Studies
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Education and Labor Relations
- Keywords
- informal economy, COVID-19 pandemic, business activity decline, urban-rural disparities, digital development, China
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