Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker

An Economic Tracker visualizes the percent change in consumer spending since the first COVID-19 case in the United States on January 20, 2020. There are options to filter charts by industry (apparel & general merchandise, entertainment, grocery, health care, restaurants & hotels, transportation) and consumer ZIP income (high, medium low).

Many additional charts are available for exploration including data visualizations related to businesses, employment, education, and public health, each with their own set of filters. Data are also available for download.

Data originate from leading private companies (e.g., credit card processors to payroll firms) and are curated by Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University nonprofit organization whose purpose is to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the economic prospects of people, businesses, and communities across the United States. The Economic Tracker is accompanied by a research paper, non-technical summary, and additional resources.

An article in NPR’s Planet Money summarizes a few key points:

• Decline in consumer spending is mostly in affluent ZIP codes
• Businesses in rich ZIP codes laid off nearly 70% of their employees
• The government rescue effort has failed to rescue the businesses that are most impacted by the pandemic
• State-permitted reopenings don’t seem to boost the economy

The Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker team concludes that traditional economic tools have limited capacity to restore consumer spending during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they provide a variety of recommendations for policy moving forward. In short, they assert that (1) the only way to drive economic recovery is to invest in public health efforts that restore consumer confidence and spending; and (2) providing and extending targeted assistance to low-income workers impacted by the economic downturn (e.g., unemployment benefits) is critical for reducing hardship and addressing disparities due to the pandemic.