Abstract
This chapter investigates the impact of COVID-19 on the Comoros’s household welfare, poverty, and labor market outcomes. The lockdown policy coincided with data collection for the 2020 Harmonized Survey on Living Conditions of Households, lending itself to a quasi-natural experiment in which households that were interviewed before the lockdown fall into the control group, while those that were interviewed after the lockdown fall into the treated group. The chapter uses matching techniques and finds a reduction in household expenditure, increased poverty, and lower likelihood of employment. Impacts are larger at the top of the distribution suggesting COVID-19 may have reduced inequality, although the poor were also negatively affected. Additionally, the ability of households to use assets as a coping mechanism was limited. In a context of limited safety nets and government interventions, stringent lockdown policies appear to increase the vulnerability of the existing poor and push others into poverty.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Pierella Paci, Nobuo Yoshida, Alvin Etang Ndip, and Djibril Ndoye at The World Bank for helpful comments on earlier drafts. We would also like to thank the National Institute of Statistics, Economic and Demographic Studies of Comoros (INSEED), for sharing the data.
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Appendix
Appendix
Post-match distribution of propensity scores across treatment and control
See Tables 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.
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Nsababera, O.U., Mendiratta, V., Sam, H. (2023). The Impact of COVID-19 on Household Welfare in the Comoros: The Experience of a Small Island Developing State. In: Johnson-Lans, S. (eds) The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality. Global Perspectives on Wealth and Distribution. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22219-1_7
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