Thus, at least for this sample of countries, employment impacts of the pandemic in upper-middle and highincome countries appear to be associated with gender and education level of workers, with women and lowskilled workers being most affected. In low and low-middle income countries, location (urban vs rural) and gender (to some extent) are the key contributors to inequality.

These patterns raise the question whether micro and small enterprises, which are more likely to employ less-skilled workers, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Estimates based on harmonized data from Business Pulse Surveys (BPS) – phone surveys of firms – conducted in 51 countries by the World Bank reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected smaller firms to a greater degree. In particular, larger firms have a lower probability of falling into arrears and can cover their costs with cash at hand for a longer period than small and micro firms (Apedo-Amah et al., 2020). Data from World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) COVID-19 Follow-up surveys across 35,496 firms in 40 countries similarly reveal a higher incidence of permanent firm closures among firms of smaller size (Karalashvili and Viganola, 2021).

# 4.2. Unequal impact on food security

Food insecurity after the pandemic was higher for countries with lower per capita income, and particularly high in some low-income countries, with more than 30 percent of households in some countries in SubSaharan Africa reporting going without food for at least one full day in the last month due to lack of resources.<sup>13</sup> Since food insecurity is pervasive in poorer countries even in normal times, its observed incidence in the data cannot be attributed directly to the pandemic, unlike work stoppages and income loss, which are based on questions in HFPS that link these losses to the pandemic. Instead, it is possible to explore whether pandemic-induced jobs and income losses are associated with worsening food security, which would suggest that the pandemic has affected food security via its economic impacts on households (Bundervoet et al., 2021).

Regressions controlling for demographic characteristics and country dummies show that respondents who had lost their job or suffered some income losses were significantly more likely to report that an adult in their household had gone a whole day without eating due to lack of resources in the last 30 days (see Annex, Figure A-2). One cannot rule out, however, that rather than food insecurity being associated with job or income losses, pre-pandemic food security was already lower among households who were more likely to experience income or job losses. This does not appear to have been the case for two countries (Ethiopia and Nigeria) where information on households’ pre-pandemic food security status is available (Bundervoet et al., 2021). This does not necessarily address the concern for all countries in the sample but lends support to the view that widespread food insecurity seen in (mostly) low-income countries in the early months of the pandemic was at least in part attributable to economic distress caused by the crisis.

# 4.3. Unequal impact on education of children

At the peak of the pandemic, temporary school closures in more than 180 countries kept nearly 1.6 billion students out of school (Azevedo et al, 2020). As classroom education was increasingly replaced by remote learning, children in poorer households, including most children in low-income countries, had minimal access to internet, computers, or even television or radios at home. The digital gaps, combined with the uneven quality of online instruction in many developing countries, are likely to have widened pre-existing

> 13 This can be seen from the World Bank’s <u>COVID-19 High Frequency Monitoring Dashboard, which uses</u> harmonized data from HFPS.

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