Socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 in low-income countries: Replication Code

This README describes the directory structure & should enable users to replicate all tables and figures for work related to Josephson, A., Kilic, T., and Michler, J.D. (2021). "Socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 in low-income countries." Nature Human Behaviour 5: 557-65. 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.

Index

• Introduction
• Data
• Data cleaning
• Pre-requisites
• Folder structure

Introduction

Contributors:

• Anna Josephson
• Jeffrey D. Michler
• Ann Furbush
• Talip Kilic

As described in more detail below, scripts various go through each step, from cleaning raw data to analysis.

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.

Pre-requisites

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

• 1. grc1leg2
• 2. palettes
• 3. catplot
• 4. blindschemes
• 5. estout

The projectdo.do file will help you install these.

Development 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.