Effects of the intensity and duration of COVID-19 lockdown policies on the use of coping strategies:Evidence from four African countries

Governments worldwide have been responding to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic with various lockdown measures. These restrictions can have positive effects on curbing the spread of the virus but may also cause serious economic challenges. Evidence on how the severity of lockdown policies impact the well-being of households in low- and middle-income countries over time is largely absent. In this paper, we study both the immediate and protracted effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on households’ use of coping strategies. Specifically, we examine how different combinations of policy intensity and duration affect the use of spending savings, selling assets, and reducing essential non-food expenditure in four African countries: Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. Using “Life with Corona Africa”, a large-scale dataset collected through continuous phone interviews over a full year in 2021, we apply a linear probability model with country- and month-fixed effects to test the combined effect of the duration and intensity of lockdown policies. We find that, immediately after the introduction of (stricter) lockdown policies, the share of households who draw down savings or sell assets to cope with shocks declines. Instead, households reduce expenditure on non-food essential items, such as education and clothing. However, this response changes with longer periods of stringent lockdowns. Analysing the impact of stringency averages over a period of 180 and 360 days, we find that households cope by drawing down their savings and selling their assets. The effects are particularly pronounced for the two poorest quintiles of all households in our sample. Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of providing adequate social safety nets for poor and vulnerable households to deal with income shocks under protracted lockdowns, since households are only able to cope over shorter periods without having to employ harmful coping mechanisms.