Measuring Pandemic and Lockdown Impacts on Wellbeing

• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Arthur Grimes
• Date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12585

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Review of Income and Wealth

Series 68, Number 2, June 2022

DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12585

MEASURING PANDEMIC AND LOCKDOWN IMPACTS

ON WELLBEING

BY ARTHUR GRIMES

School of Government, VictoriaUniversity of Wellington

Motu Economic and Public PolicyResearch

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Zealand’s ofcial statistical agency (StatsNZ) moved

quickly to supplement the quarterly Household Labour Force Survey with wellbeing measures from

the General Social Survey. The rst supplement (June 2020) began toward the end of a restrictive

national lockdown. Subsequent quarterly surveys continued through a second lockdown for the

Auckland region, enabling tests of regional lockdown impacts. Survey measures include questions on

life satisfaction, health, income adequacy, social capital (trust), and loneliness. Published aggregated

data indicate that life satisfaction, social capital, health, and nancial wellbeing were each higher

through the pandemic (in 2020) than prior to it, including for disadvantagedgroups, but loneliness rose.

Analysis of the individual-level data, conned to the within-pandemic period, however indicates that

more restrictive lockdowns were associated both with reduced life satisfaction and greater loneliness,

with differing impacts according to labor marketand household status.

JEL Codes: I12, I31

Keywords:COVID-19, lockdown, statistical surveys, wellbeing, loneliness

1. INTRODUCTION

Considerable scientic and policy attention is focused on impacts of the

COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns on health and wellbeing.

Once this pandemic is over, the policy option of implementing a lockdown in the

face of future pandemics remains. Hence it is critical to gather reliable data that

can be used to derive lessons about whether a lockdown which is successful on the

Note: I thank the editor and two referees of this journal, and Phillip Morrison and participants

at the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) 2021 conference for valuable feedback on

prior versions of this paper. I particularlythank Nic Watson for his excellent research assistance in the

preparationof this paper. The research was partiallyfunded by an internal grant from Victoria University

of Wellington.Access to the data used in this study was provided byStats NZ under conditions designed

to giveeffect to the security and condentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975. The results presented

in this study are the workof the author,not Stats NZ or individual data suppliers. These results are not

ofcial statistics.They have been created for research purposes fromthe Integrated Data Infrastructure

(IDI) which is carefully managed by StatsNZ. For more information about the IDI please visit https://

www.stats.govt.nz/integrated-data/.

Funding information: Open access publishing facilitated by VictoriaUniversity of Wellington, as part

of the Wiley - Victoria University of Wellington agreement via the Council of Australian University

Librarians.[Correction added on 21st May 2022, after rst online publication: CAULfunding statement

has been added.]

*Correspondence to: Arthur Grimes, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington,

PO Box 600, Wellington6140, New Zealand (arthur.grimes@vuw.ac.nz).

© 2022 The Authors.Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of

International Association forResearch in Income and Wealth.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in anymedium, provided the original work is

properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modicationsor adaptations are made.

409

Review of Income and Wealth, Series 68, Number 2, June 2022

medical front can be applied in a form that does not cause societal wellbeing to

decrease.

This study documents the actions of a nationalstatistical agency, StatisticsNew

Zealand (Stats NZ), in measuring wellbeing outcomes through the pandemic by

initiating wellbeing supplements to the existing quarterly Household Labour Force

Survey (HLFS). The wellbeing focus reected the NewZealand government’s focus

on wellbeing as a guide for policy (Grimes, 2020a). After outlining Stats NZ’s sur-

vey initiatives, the paper initially presents aggregated wellbeing gures using Stats

NZ’s ofcial published data. The aggregated data are presented for both the most

recent (2018) General Social Survey (GSS) prior to the pandemic and for the rst

three quarterly HLFS wellbeing supplements conducted through the pandemic in

the June, September, and December quarters of 2020. The paper then turns to the

individual-level survey data to test the effects of pandemic lockdowns within the

rst three quarters of the pandemic.

Stats NZ’s aggregated gures challenge an emerging consensus from other

studies of a trade-off between a lockdown’s epidemiological merits and wellbeing

(De Neve et al.,2020; Miles et al.,2020; Graham, 2020; Warren and Bordoloi, 2020;

Brodeur et al.,2021; Clark and Lepinteur, 2022). Overall life satisfaction, health

status, income adequacy, and trust were all higher through the rst three quarters

of the pandemic (even in the face of national and regional lockdowns) than in the

most recent prior GSS. However, there was also a loss of social contact exhibited

through a rise in loneliness, a factor emphasized by Hamermesh (2020).

While providing useful descriptive quarterly information, the aggregated

gures cannot disentangle the separate effects of lockdowns from those of the

pandemic itself; nor do the quarterly dates correspond to actual lockdown dates.

To address these issues, the analysis utilizes the individual-level data collected in

the Stats NZ wellbeing supplements and leverages the timing and differing severity

of regional lockdowns through 2020 to examine wellbeing impacts of lockdowns.

Lockdown requirements differed in Auckland (the largest city) relative to the rest

of New Zealand. Knowledge of survey timing and region for each respondent

enables more precise analysis of the impacts of lockdowns on wellbeing outcomes

than can be obtained by referring just to the aggregated data.

The results of the analysis indicate that, within the pandemic period, lock-

downs of greater severity reduced respondents’ levels of life satisfaction and raised

the prevalence of loneliness. The conclusions with respect to loneliness are consis-

tent with the aggregated statistics which show that loneliness was more prevalent

through the pandemic than prior to it. However, the resultsfor life satisfaction differ

from those indicatedby the aggregated data which indicate thatlife satisfaction (and

a range of other wellbeing indicators) washigher through the pandemic than before.

The concluding section offers potential explanations for these contrasting results.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2providesbackground, briey describ-

ing New Zealand’spandemic experience and policies. Section 3examines challenges

in conducting surveys of wellbeing during the pandemic. Section 4outlines the

study’s methodology, while Section 5presents results using both the aggregated

quarterly dataand using the individual-level repeat cross-section data fromthe three

HLFS 2020 wellbeing supplements. Section 6concludes with observations on mea-

surement issues and on the trajectory of wellbeing outcomes through the pandemic.

© 2022 The Authors.Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of

International Association forResearch in Income and Wealth.

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