Impact of COVID-19 shutdown on economic resilience of low-income households and its implications for livelihood interventions: the case of Bangladesh

Abstract

COVID-19 shutdown provides a unique opportunity to assess how the low-income households engaged in urban and rural formal and informal economies coped with the shock and how it affected their capacity to cope with such shocks in the near future. Insights on the income and expenditure, savings and borrowing patterns of the low-income households can help us to understand how the coping mechanism and coping capacity varies across different types of low-income households. In turn, it can help us understand the weaknesses in their coping capacity which should be addressed for these households to become more resilient against such external shocks. This paper examines the coping mechanism and the coping capacity of the low-income households based on rapid surveys that were undertaken during the COVID-19 shutdown period in Bangladesh by the author and other agencies in Bangladesh.