Pandemic’s E-commerce Surge Proves Less Persistent, More Varied by Joel Alcedo, Alberto Cavallo, Bricklin Dwyer, Prachi Mishra, and Antonio Spilimbergo published by Blog/IMF (3/2022).
“Spikes in the share of online spending are dissipating overall, but there’s significant variation by industry
There’s no doubt that e-commerce helped many navigate the pandemic, from online shopping to curbside pickup to food delivery. But as we slowly emerge from lockdowns and other restrictions, it’s less clear how this shift to digital commerce may evolve across economies and industries.
This raises questions about how much digital consumption increased, whether the crisis widened the digital divide or spurred economies with little e-commerce to catch up, how permanent the shift to online sales will be, and what factors explain deviations between economies and sectors.
We investigated these questions in new research that uses a unique database of aggregated and anonymized transactions through the Mastercard network from across 47 countries from January 2018 to September 2021. We found that the share of online spending rose more in economies where e-commerce already played a large role—and that the increase is reversing as the pandemic recedes.
This research, a new partnership between Mastercard, the International Monetary Fund and Harvard Business School, shows how private-sector data can help advance empirical economics and will be the first in a series of such studies…”
