Global City Economic Watch
As large-scale quarantine measures limit the movement of urban populations globally, we are providing a weekly glance at real-time indicators to assess the level of slowdown in economic activity and how quickly cities are beginning to return to normal.
2 minutes to read
In this week’s edition we look at a different indicators within Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Report* on a city-by-city basis and provide an update on the latest flight activity.
Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Report analyses how visits and the time spent at different places have changed compared to a baseline. Here we focus on the change in mobility identified amongst retail and recreation venues.
As with last week’s office mobility the largest declines have been for some of the hardest hit areas, notably Madrid, Milan and Paris where retail and recreational mobility has dropped by between 87% and 94%. Vienna and Prague have seen their declines moderate, from -85% and -77% to -80% and -73% respectively.
Cities with the largest declines in the three weeks to 16 April include Singapore, which recently introduced stricter lockdown conditions, here retail and recreational mobility shifted from -28% to -61%. The United Arab Emirates, who recently introduced a 24-hour lockdown in Dubai and night curfew in Abu Dhabi, saw their comparable figures move from -55% to -64%. As countries and cities start to reopen businesses this will be a key indicator to see how quickly the population returns to retail and recreational establishments.
With travel restrictions in place across many countries, the number of scheduled and tracked flight departures has drastically fallen in recent weeks. In the figure below, we look at the change in the number of weekly flights for the week ending 16 April compared to one week earlier.
Tokyo and Los Angeles saw their numbers fall the most with 246 and 229 average daily flights, respectively, 131 and 82 less than the previous week. Conversely, Shanghai and Seoul saw their weekly averages rise to 196 and 74 respectively. However, for Seoul this is still a third lower than a month ago.
Next week we will check in on the latest for the Citymapper Mobility Index and TomTom Traffic Index to see how the population are moving around each city. We will also be keeping an eye on other high frequency indicators such as restaurant bookings and box office takings for when these establishments start to reopen.
Notes on methodology
*Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Report analyses the how visits and time spent at different places change compared to a baseline. The baseline is the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the 5- week period Jan 3–Feb 6, 2020