swiftly influence the distribution of demographic variables in countries. For example, the urban share of residents could have been heavily influenced by the internal migration of citizens returning to their home villages or to other rural areas or to take up remote work, or by people migrating from rural to urban areas in order to search for better livelihoods during the pandemic. These changes happened swiftly, in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 in low- and middle-income countries (see, for example, evidence for Brazil (Garcia, 2021), SubSaharan Africa (FAO, 2020), and Peru (Dupraz-Dobias, 2020)). We take up such swift changes as a caveat while interpreting the data.

<mark>Data from figure 3.1 indicate that in Kenya and Indonesia, the urban share is well captured reasonably accurately in the online survey. For Brazil, the survey underrepresents urban areas. In Egypt and Sri Lanka, the survey overrepresents urban areas. Türkiye has a very high share of urban data points in the online survey, but location data are not available for Türkiye in the GMD. Overall, this mixed picture is consistent with the expectation that urbanization itself might be changing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as noted above. Comparison with the Internet using population in GMD (figure 3.2) presents a different picture and shows that urban residents are underrepresented in the online survey. Female respondents are underrepresented in the online survey in all countries, which is consistent with many studies, particularly, Valliant and Dever (2011) for the United States. Younger people are overrepresented in online surveys in all countries and older people are underrepresented in the online survey, which is consistent with findings in Steinmetz et al. (2009) for the cases of Germany and the Netherlands, and by Valliant and Dever (2011) in the United States. These results are robust when we compare the online survey with the Internet-using population in GMD in figure 3.2.</mark> <mark>Primary and secondary education are underrepresented in the online survey across countries, except Sri Lanka for primary education and Indonesia for secondary education. This trend broadly holds true even if we compare the online survey with the Internet using population from GMD. Tertiary education is overrepresented in the online surveys in all countries. This holds true if we compare internet using population from GMD, except in the case of Indonesia. Consistent with this, the literature shows that those with higher education are overrepresented in online surveys in most countries, with one exception. For example, as per Steinmetz et al. (2009), in the Netherlands, low and medium educated persons are underrepresented, and in Germany highly educated persons are underrepresented. In the United States, Valliant and Dever (2011) find that individuals in web survey volunteer samples have better education and higher income.</mark><sup>19</sup> <mark>Households with one member are overrepresented in the online surveys, but households with three or more members are underrepresented in online surveys, and this is consistent in comparison with the Internet using population.</mark> <mark>Web surveys could be targeted to specific kinds of individuals, which adds to another layer of bias. Steinmetz et al. (2009) shows that low and medium education workers are more likely to fill the survey in Germany because the links are provided in the trade union website. In our case, the survey was posed to those who mistype web addresses or those who stumble on a broken link. While we are unable to quantify this bias, its direction is unclear. While those who access the Internet regularly are more likely to click on broken links, those who access the Internet sparsely are also likely to mistype addresses because of their unfamiliarity.</mark>

> 19 A possible reason why respondents in the Internet surveys have higher access to education than others is that those with access to Internet itself are more educated than those without access (Schonlau et al., 2009).

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