The social effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Who are the new poor in Georgia?, Alessandro Carraro (UNICEF Innocenti - Office of Research and Foresight)

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) such as social distancing, business and school closures have been introduced worldwide to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In Georgia NPIs affected children’s lives, contributing to the emergence of new categories of poor. In-depth empirical understanding on which categories of people have most suffered the shock is still limited. By relying on Georgia Integrated Household Survey (IHS) for 2017–2021, we traced the differentiated impacts of NPIs throughout the start of the pandemic in the first two quarters of 2020. Households with children have been hit harder and although an economic rebound started to happen in the last quarters of 2020 our trend analysis suggested that these effects may last longer than the pandemic. The NPIs reshaped the characteristics of poverty, exacerbating gender and area inequalities and placing greatest burden on households with children especially in rural areas, with larger impacts for those relying on self-employment.