The Evolving Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19 in Four African Countries: Replication Code

This README describes the directory structure & Stata packages necessary to replicate all analysis for the book chapter "The evolving socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 in four African countries" in Shaping Africa's Post-Covid Recovery, edited by Rabah Arezki, Simeon Djankov, and Ugo Panizza. The work relies on the World Bank LSMS and World Bank COVID phone surveys. For more information and to access these phone surveys, visit the World Bank Microdata Library. The relevant surveys are available under under the High-Frequency Phone Survey collection: http://bit.ly/microdata-hfps. We make no guarantee that variables not used in the analysis are cleaned or accurate.

Last updated: January 2021.

For issues or concerns with this repo, please contact Anna Josephson or Jeffrey Michler.

Index

• Contributors
• Data
• Data cleaning
• Developing Environment

Contributors

• Ann Furbush
• Anna Josephson [aljosephson@arizona.edu]
• Talip Kilic
• Jeffrey D. Michler [jdmichler@arizona.edu]

Data

The publicly-available data for each survey round is coupled with a basic information document, interview manual, and questionnaire for that round, which can be accessed through:

• Ethiopia: http://bit.ly/ethiopia-phonesurvey
• Malawi: http://bit.ly/malawi-phonesurvey
• Nigeria: http://bit.ly/nigeria-phonesurvey
• Uganda: http://bit.ly/uganda-phonesurvey

The approach to the phone survey questionnaire design and sampling is comparable across countries. It is informed by the template questionnaire and the phone survey sampling guidelines that have been publicly made available by the World Bank. These can be accessed through:

• Template Questionnaire: http://bit.ly/templateqx
• Manual: http://bit.ly/interviewermanual
• Sampling Guidelines: http://bit.ly/samplingguidelines.

Data cleaning

Pre-requisites

The data processing and analysis requires a number of user-written Stata programs:

• 1. grc1leg2
• 2. palettes
• 3. catplot

The projectdo.do file will help you install these.

Developing Environment

Step 1

Clone this repository https://github.com/afurbush/evolving_impacts_covid_africa. The general repo structure looks as follows:

evolving_impacts_covid_africa
├────README.md
├────projectdo.do
├────LICENSE
├────country             /* one dir for each country */
│    ├──wave             /* one file for each wave */
│    └──master
└────analysis            /* overall analysis */
     ├──pnl_cleaning
     └──evolving_impacts

Step 2

Open the projectdo.do file and update the global filepath with your username in Section 0 (a).

 if `"`c(username)'"' == "USERNAME" {
    	global 		code  	"C:/Users/USERNAME/git/evolving_impacts_covid_africa"
 	global 		data	"C:/Users/USERNAME/evolving_impacts/data"
 	global 		output  "C:/Users/USERNAME/evolving_impacts/output"
 }

Step 3

Set up the file structure on your local machine as outlined below:

C:/Users/USERNAME/evolving_impacts
├────output
     ├──stata_graphs
└────data
     ├──analysis
     ├──ethiopia
     │    ├──refined
     │    └──raw
     │         ├──wave_01
     │         ├──wave_02
     │         ├──wave_03
     │         ├──wave_04
     │         └──wave_05
     ├──malawi
     │    ├──refined
     │    └──raw
     │         ├──wave_01
     │         ├──wave_02
     │         ├──wave_03
     │         └──wave_04
     ├──nigeria
     │    ├──refined
     │    └──raw
     │         ├──wave_01
     │         ├──wave_02
     │         ├──wave_03
     │         ├──wave_04
     │         └──wave_05
     └──uganda
          ├──refined
          └──raw
               ├──wave_01
               ├──wave_02
               └──wave_03

Step 4

Download microdata Stata files from the following links. You will need to create an account with the World Bank if you do not already have one and will be asked to provide a reason for downloading the data. Once data are downloaded, save the data files to the corresponding folders created in Step 3.

• Ethiopia Waves 1-5: http://bit.ly/ethiopia-phonesurvey
• Malawi Waves 1-4: http://bit.ly/malawi-phonesurvey
• Nigeria Waves 1-5: http://bit.ly/nigeria-phonesurvey
• Uganda Waves 1-3: http://bit.ly/uganda-phonesurvey

Step 5

Run the projectdo.do file. Output graphs will be saved to the output folder.