Figure 4 presents data for 2020 across the same regions as in Figure 1. All regions are increasing from January to February, and most at similar rates. However, in March, all regions show a marked change, with four of the six decreasing coincident with the start of the crisis. South Asia shows a dip in May and June, before rebounding in July and August. Four regions continue decreasing over the few months following the onset of the crisis, while Sub-Saharan Africa seems to recover and even increase rather substantially in the last several months of the year. Finally, consistent with the NO2 results shown in Figure 2, North America shows a steep increase in the second quarter of the year followed by a steady decrease in the next three months. A rebound is observed only in the last quarter of the year.

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When we disaggregate by country income in Figure 5, we see a similar dip in March in three of the four categories, but these dips are relatively small. The only category that appears to have a sustained decrease is lower middle income; nightlights decrease in March, April, and May, before showing a brief increase in the following months. None of the categories shows consistent decreases from the previous year. In fact, high-income countries show the lowest increases but are right at zero for the entire year. The other three categories are above zero in almost all months and sometimes substantially above zero.

Overall, NO2 appears to correlate with the onset of the crisis in upper-middle-income and highincome countries, but nightlights do not seem to exhibit a consistent pattern.

# 3.2 Google data

a. Mobility Figure 6 presents the Google mobility data for all the countries in our sample. The baseline for most areas is February, which is why we see all of the trends clustered around zero (i.e. no change from the baseline) in that month. Visits to all locations outside residences decreased markedly in March, bottoming out in April, with the largest relative decreases in transit stations and retail/recreation locations. On the other hand, time in residences increased markedly in April before slowly decreasing but remaining above pre-crisis levels. Moreover, while visits to grocery and pharmacy locations rebounded to February levels by around October, the other four nonresidence locations – with the exception of parks, which see a bit of a jump during the northern hemisphere summer – remain well below pre-pandemic levels throughout the year. In January of 2021, all these locations were still more than 20 percent below their February levels.

We generally see the same trends across regions. Figure 7 presents trends for four separate locations – workplaces, grocery/pharmacy, residences, and retail/recreation – for all seven regions. Beginning with workplaces, we see the same marked decrease in visits in March and April, with visits again bottoming out in the latter month. There is quite a bit of heterogeneity across regions, however. For example, Latin American and the Caribbean countries see a decrease of almost 50 percent in April, while East Asia and the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa see declines of just half that amount.

There are similar amounts of heterogeneity in the other three categories, though the patterns sometimes differ. For example, while grocery/pharmacy shows a decrease in most regions, there is a noted increase in visits to these locations in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean 8