Urban tourism and Covid-19 in Poland

World Tourism Organisation estimates an 80% drop in tourist arrivals by the end of 2020. The Polish tourism industry is also dramatically affected by the ongoing pandemic, with a 30% drop in the number of tourists in July 2020 compared to July 2019. The global lockdown has limited the functioning of the tourism sector, therefore domestic tourism, including urban tourism, may rise in importance. Domestic urban tourism can become a useful response to the growing resilience of the tourism industry, for example in the context of reducing dependence between the tourism industry and mobility which favours the spread of coronavirus. The potential of urban tourism in Poland is clearly visible (in 2019, it was three times higher than rural tourism in terms of overnight stays provided). However, the COVID-19 pandemic is not conducive to urban tourism in Poland, for instance, because infections are much more frequent in cities than in rural areas. The aim of the research, in addition to checking destinations of Poles in the context of urban tourism in the era of the pandemic, was to learn about the behaviour of tourists during their holiday trips. To achieve the aim of the paper, the study was conducted from 16 to 31 August 2020, using CAWI survey method, among people who visited Polish cities starting from May 2020 through the end of August 2020 (following the partial lifting of restrictions). The research indicated, despite the threat, the popularity of the largest tourist destinations in Poland. It also indicated that the behaviour and decisions of tourists were not different from those before the pandemic.

How to measure the territorial economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in contexts with scarce regional data?

In this paper we propose an index to approximate the territorial economic impact of the COVID–19 pandemic in contexts with scarce or outdated regional data, which is often the case in developing countries. This index is based on data that are usually available in most countries: a) the sectoral productive structure of the regions, b) the operational level of each sector, c) the mobility of workers in each region, and d) the possibility of remote work among sectors. The empirical application for Argentina describes the impact of the pandemic on regional production during the second and third quarters of 2020, both for the provinces and labor market areas. Our results show that the regional impact of COVID–19 on private economic activity was highly heterogeneous between and within provinces. The proposed index is also highly correlated with sporadic official data coming from national agencies, while it has a wider geographical and temporal scope, especially in terms of labor market areas.

Spatial Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Hungary

This paper examines the spatial dynamics and regional distribution of the novel coronavirus epidemic in Hungary in an effort to obtain a deeper understanding of the connection between space and health. The paper also presents comprehensive epidemiologic data on the spatiotemporal spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of the epidemic waves. Following a comparison of the growth rates of infection numbers, the current study explores the geographical dimension of the three pandemic waves. The partial transformation of spatial characteristics during the three epidemic waves is among the most important results found. While geographical hotspots influenced the first wave, newly confirmed coronavirus cases in the second and third waves were due to community-based epidemic spreading. Furthermore, the western-eastern spatial relation and the core-periphery model also affected the regional distribution of new cases and deaths in the initial two waves. However, a new spatial pattern - realised by the northern-southern spatial orientation - appeared during the third wave. The outputs of this paper offer feasible suggestions for evidence-based policymaking in pandemic prevention, mitigation, and preparedness.

Antibiotic Self-Medication and Antibiotic Resistance: Multilevel Regression Analysis of Repeat Cross-Sectional Survey Data in Europe

Antibiotic resistance is a global public health issue with several anthropogenic drivers, including antibiotic consumption. Recent studies have highlighted that the relationship between antibiotic consumption and antibiotic resistance is contextualised by a variety of socioeconomic, cultural, and governance-related drivers of consumption behaviour and contagion that have been underexamined. A potential complication for research and policy is that measures of antibiotic consumption are often reliant on prescribing or sales data which may not easily take into account the dynamics of community consumption that include self-medication; for example, the preservation and use of leftover medication or the obtaining of antibiotics without a prescription. This study uses repeated cross-sectional survey data to fulfil two core aims: firstly, to examine the individual-level and national-contextual determinants of self-medication among antibiotic consumers in European countries, and secondly, to examine the relationship between self-medication behaviour and antibiotic resistance at the national level. This study is particularly novel in its application of a multilevel modelling specification that includes individual-level factors with both time-variant and persistent national characteristics to examine antibiotic consumption behaviours. The key findings of the study are that survey respondents in countries with persistently higher levels of inequality, burdens of out-of-pocket health expenditure, and corruption have an increased probability of self-medicating with antibiotics. The study also highlights that overall levels of antibiotic consumption and antibiotic self-medication do not correlate and are associated heterogeneously with changes in different pathogen/antibiotic pairs. In summary, the study emphasises that antibiotic stewardship and antibiotic resistance, whilst related by biological mechanisms, are also inherently social issues. Attempts to improve antibiotic stewardship and address the challenge of antibiotic resistance should also attend to structural challenges that underlie challenges to antibiotic stewardship in the community, such as the effects of inequality and reduced access to healthcare services.

The promise of endogenous potential in times of crisis

The measures against the spread of the Covid-19 virus have massive effects on local economies. By means of an explorative qualitative case study in deprived neighbourhoods in the Middle Lower Rhine region of Germany, this paper explicitly aims at examining the Corona pandemic’s impact on their endogenous potential. In this context, the focus is on organisations whose main contribution lies in the fulfilment of the function of integration and communication. The analysis is based on theoretical concepts of the local economy, but it also refers to crisis as well as transition research, especially the multilevel perspective framework. By means of desktop research, a focus group with multipliers involved in local economic contexts as well as thirteen guideline-based interviews with the heads of local organisations, the subsequent analysis reveals the partially counteracting effects of the Corona pandemic on the organisations’ socio-economic embeddedness. On the one hand, they are threatened by economic bottlenecks, by pending social consequences of a longer period without or with minimized offerings as well as by fear of contagion and exhaustion. While the organisation’s perceived level of urgency varies greatly, their level of uncertainty is generally high. On the other hand, organisations of the local economy benefit from a positive push in the areas of digitization and new life and working environments (home-based work), as well as from a strengthening of local solidarity and cohesion.

Regional Innovation Systems of Medical Technology

We investigated the role of external funding in cardiovascular device innovation across 31 countries in Europe. We rely on the knowledge production function (KPF) framework that establishes the knowledge output of a region as a function of innovatory effort and other characteristics of that region. In a cross-sectional analysis, we investigated regional variation in knowledge production by the number of publications in cardiovascular device research obtained from the bibliometric data of the world’s largest biomedical library, the US National Library of Medicine, 2014‒2017. We mapped these publications to product categories of medical devices approved for cardiovascular diseases by the US Food and Drug Administration. Considering spatial correlation across regions of Europe in our estimates of the KPF, we investigated the impact of two types of funding mechanisms: grants reported in the publications and the volume of European Union Horizon 2020 funding received by the innovating regions. We obtained 123,487 cardiovascular device-related publications distributed across 1,051 (75% of total) regions (NUTS-3 level). Receiving external funding strongly contributes to a region’s knowledge output. The estimated elasticities of innovatory effort range between 0.51 and 0.64. These estimates were consistently larger than the elasticities of other characteristics in the region measured by gross domestic product (0.14‒0.56). We also documented spillover effects from neighboring regions when the funding was measured by the grants reported in the publications, concluding that innovatory efforts in the form of external research investments are effective for promoting innovation in the medical device industry at the regional level.

Isolation and well-being in the time of lockdown

In response to the Covid‑19 health crisis, the French government has imposed various measures, referred to as social-distancing measures, including a lockdown with the primary objective of reducing face-to-face interactions between people in order to limit the spread of the virus. This paper seeks to determine if the social-distancing measures and lockdown lead to social isolation for certain people and have an impact on French people’s well-being. First, it reveals that the feelings of social isolation have substantially increased in France during this lockdown. Second, it explores the factors that help to explain these changes by developing a predictive model and reveals that living alone, being a woman, being young are factors that explain this increase in felling of social isolation. Third, the estimation of the effects of changes in feelings of social isolation on changes in the reported level of well-being of French respondents during lockdown shows that people who reported feeling more socially isolated than others has the lowest levels of well-being among the French population; and that the increase in people’s feelings of social isolation during lockdown is a factor that has a negative impact on their level of well-being.

The Pandemic Economy

Since its emergence in 2019, the worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has created a vast economic crisis as government lockdowns place considerable strain on businesses of all kinds – particularly those that rely on face-to-face contact, such as retail restaurants, and personal services. Given the recent emergence of the virus and lags in data collection and publication, the highest-quality fine-grained spatial datasets on economic behavior will not reflect virus-related impacts for at least a year. At the same time, in order to make evidence-based decisions on policies regarding continuing lockdown and/or re-opening policies, local governments and researchers need to understand neighborhood-level economic effects much sooner than that. This paper makes use of the point-level Chicago Business License dataset, which is updated on a weekly basis, to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on new business activity in the City of Chicago. The results indicate that on average, from March to September 2020, total monthly new business starts have declined by 33.4% compared to the monthly average of new starts in the City from January 2016 to December 2019. Food service and retail businesses have been hardest hit during this period, while chains of all types have seen larger average declines in new startup activity than independent businesses. These patterns demonstrate interesting intra-urban spatial heterogeneity; ZIP codes with the largest pandemic-related declines in new business activity tend to be have larger rates average rates of new business creation to begin with and also have less dense, diverse, and walkable built environments (defined in more detail below), while, interestingly, observed COVID-19 case rates do not appear to have an individually-significant impact on new business deficits.

Spatial Shopping Behavior in a Multi-Channel Environment: A Discrete Choice Model Approach

Spatial impacts of online shopping are discussed frequently in retail geography. Here, online shopping is mostly regarded as a central driver of competition for physical retailing and its locations, such as town centers or malls. Due to its high popularity, cross-channel shopping is sometimes considered to be a support for physical retailing. However, traditional retail location theory does not consider shopping channels other than in-store shopping. Furthermore, although online shopping is far too important to be neglected in examining consumer spatial shopping behavior, there is an obvious lack in the previous literature towards incorporating multi- and cross-channel shopping into store choice models. The present study aims to identify the main drivers of store choice on the basis that both in-store and online shopping alternatives are available, as well as the opportunity for cross-channel shopping. Taking into account previous literature on both physical store choice and multi-channel shopping, hypotheses on the impact of different shopping transaction costs (such as travel time, delivery charges, or uncertainty with respect to the stores' assortment) were derived. Based on a representative consumer survey, real past shopping decisions in three retail sectors (groceries, consumer electronics [CE], and furniture) were collected. The econometric analysis of empirical store choices was performed using a nested logit model which includes both physical and online stores. The results confirm several assumptions of classical retail location theory as well as previous findings from single-firm studies and stated choice experiments on multi-channel shopping behavior. Travel time to physical stores reduces consumer utility and store choice probability, respectively. Consumer sensitivity towards travel time decreases with decreasing purchase frequency of the desired goods. Delivery charges also decrease the likelihood of choosing a store. The impact of cross-channel integration on store choice (assuming the reduction of consumer transaction costs) is considerably lower than expected and differs between retail sectors. While furniture retailers profit from enabling cross-channel shopping, there is no such competitive advantage found for grocery and CE retailers. The positive effect of assortment on condition of diminishing marginal utility is confirmed for grocery stores and CE stores, but not for furniture stores. From a theoretical perspective, this study shows that multi- and cross-channel shopping behavior does not contradict the main thoughts of classical retail location theory. From a practical perspective, the study is a contribution as store choice models play a significant role in both business location planning and governmental land use planning.

The determinants of Covid-19 mortality rates across Europe

The aim of this paper is to examine empirically the impact of the demographic structure and socio-economic environment on the Covid-19 mortality rate across 29 European countries. The analysis is based on empirical data recorded cumulatively from the start of the Covid-19 disease until 26th May 2020 covering ‘the first wave of the pandemic’. Results indicate that, although countries with a higher degree of ageing structure are anticipated to be more vulnerable to Covid-19, this study provides evidence that population ageing contributes only marginally to Covid-19 death rates across Europe. Urbanization, the level of economic development and health care systems, seem to better explain patterns of interstate mortality rates. The analysis provides important policy implications since it underlines the importance of urbanization and socio-economic conditions in the accelerating incidence of casualties and signifies the importance of health care systems for the protection of people and places from the pandemic.