Worrying results from the latest World Bank Myanmar survey on households
World Bank Myanmar presents results from its recent nationally representative survey on Household’s Living Conditions and Enterprises’ Activities to monitor impacts and changes in employment, incomes and poverty caused by COVID-19.
The results are drawn from monthly phone surveys with randomly selected households and firms across the different sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, construction, retail and personal services, tourism and trade, public and private administration and other industries.
Out of 500 firms that participated in the survey, agriculture firms seems to be the most vulnerable to cash flow shortage (42%).
Negative effects on employment and labor income are significant, between 50%-68% of workers faced a reduction in earnings. In half of the households surveyed, the main worker had no work in the last seven days. Since the end of March 2020, half of those still at work have experienced a decrease in income. 75% of rice growing farmers said they have not started rice planting yet for the upcoming season.
Even though food security is not yet alarming, the findings clearly highlight the fact that since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, about half of the households were forced to cut food consumption to cope with income loss, in 11 percent of the interviewed households, at least one adult member has eaten less than usual over a 30 days period. Over the same period, 7 percent of households have reportedly run out of food. About half of households report to reduce their food intake to cope with shocks, which threatens human development in the long term.
See the PDF file link for a complete summary report;
- Rapid Information from household high-frequency monitoring (Brief no. 1, Published:09 July, 2020)
- The Firm-Level Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic (Brief no. 2, Published: 14 July, 2020).