Did COVID-19 discriminate in the global South? Revealing heterogeneity of urban households’ livelihood resilience based on evidence from Bangladesh, China, India and Philippines

Abstract

“Lives or livelihoods” is a hard trade-off when confronting COVID-19, especially for cities in the Global South. Countermeasures to protect people's lives may exert negative impacts on urban households and test their livelihood resilience. Did COVID-19 discriminate? Did livelihood resilience vary among different urban households within and across different countries and cities? Established studies focused on rural households' livelihood resilience under climate change or natural hazard based on single country context. Little is known about the variety of urban households' livelihood resilience under COVID-19 across countries and cities. This study aims to fill this gap by revealing heterogeneity of livelihood resilience at both individual urban household level and country level. First-hand questionnaire survey data (N ​= ​4374) were collected from seven cities from Bangladesh, China, India, and Philippines. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical methods, it's found that: COVID-19 did discriminate. Urban households with larger household size, no home ownership, no financial assets, and household heads with low education level, informal employed and no flexibility to transfer to work from home, were vulnerable groups. COVID-19 also discriminated across cities. Cities with a high ratio of informal workers, no effective economic relief policies and long stringent mobility restriction measures performed worse.