Abstract
The COVID-19 public health crisis has quickly led to an economic crisis, impacting many people and businesses in the world. This study examines how the pandemic affects workforces and workers' income. We quantify the impact of staggered resumption of work, after the coronavirus lockdowns, on the migrant workers' income. Using data on population movements of 366 Chinese cities at the daily level from the Baidu Maps-Migration Big Data Platform and historical data on the average monthly income of migrant workers, we find that the average work resumption rate (WRR) during the period of the Chinese Lantern Festival was 25.25%, which was only 30.67% of that in the same matched lunar calendar period in 2019. We then apply Gray Model First Order One Variable [GM (1, 1)] to predict the monthly income of migrant workers during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that, if without the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the average monthly income of migrant workers in 2020 will be expected to increase by 12% compared with 2019. We further conduct scenario analysis and show that the average monthly income of migrant workers in 2020 under the conservative scenario (COS), medium scenario (MES), and worse scenario (WOS) will be predicted to decrease by 2, 21, and 44%, respectively. Through testing, our prediction error is <5%. Our findings will help policymakers to decide when and how they implement a plan to ease the coronavirus lockdown and related financial support policies.
Highlights
In December 2019, a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19 for short) appeared in Wuhan, China [1, 2]
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 in China started in Wuhan on January 23, 2020, we obtained the data of population immigration and emigration of 366 cities in China from January 10 to March 1, 2020
In the context of the global outbreak of the COVID-19, it is very important to evaluate the impact of the epidemic on the return to work of rural labor and low-income groups’ income such as migrant workers
Summary
In December 2019, a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19 for short) appeared in Wuhan, China [1, 2]. The effective prevention and control measures of this epidemic should become the top priority of all governments around the world. The Chinese government activated first-level emergency response in order to deal with the outbreak of this epidemic. China has managed to contain the virus through the use of those draconian control measures, but at a heavy price. After months of lockdown in China, the government is slowly easing emergency measures. It is very important to assess the impact of the COVID-19 on the Chinese labor market and low-income groups, such as migrant workers who most likely lost their jobs during this crisis, in order to provide empirically based implications for government policies that aim to orderly organize workers to resume work and production and guarantee farmers’ income after the epidemic alleviates
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