Summary: 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, daily life was severely disrupted, and a marked change can be observed in the aggregated spending patterns of consumer groups. This week’s chart highlights the quality and suitability of private consumption data to track the Retail Seles Index in Singapore through the pandemic.

Asia Competitiveness Institute has partnered with Mastercard to utilize insights based on aggregated and anonymized transaction data – on an indexed, daily basis – to study the changing consumption patterns through the pandemic. Mastercard Insights are useful to researchers, policymakers and business. Other opportunities to gather and aggregate such data would be useful to conduct novel forms of analysis to generate even more valuable insights.

Highlights:

• High frequency transaction data has been increasingly used to understand and validate macro level spending trends across various countries and context

• Advance estimates of the immediate economic crises caused by strict lockdown measures were made possible by such high quality, high frequency data

• Spending levels can also be analyzed at a granular level across multiple categories and granular geographic region for targeted insights

Article By LIM, Jing Zhi 

Graphic By Shu En LEE