The COVID-19 pandemic placed new constraints and prices on commuting to work around the world. However, traditional methods of measuring household welfare (and, accordingly, poverty and inequality) based on expenditures have not considered these changes. First, we present theory showing significant mismeasurement of welfare for households who can shift into remote work during the pandemic. We then propose methods to impute transportation cost equivalents for household expenditure aggregates. We use Georgia as a case study to compare these methods and assess impacts on poverty and inequality. The proportion of remote work is low, only about 9%, meaning that the impact on overall inequality is negligible. However, considering transportation costs can result in up to a 40% reduction in the measured poverty rate among remote-working households.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.