During COVID-19 period, a change in household spending has occurred to prevent the pandemic of COVID-19, for example: buying extra products such as masks, hand sanitizers, vitamins or changing the routine of life such as using taxi instead of public transportation or buying more food due to the long period of staying at home. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to assess the average extra costs of each item to predict the total average extra costs in household spending.
The present study reveals that 11% of families had one person lost his job. On the other hand, a survey conducted by Adams-Prassl et al. in late March 2020 showed that 8% of workers had lost their job (Adams-Prassl et al. 2020) and another study found that 3% of employees had lost their jobs (Gardiner and Slaughter 2020). Regarding income, 62% of households reported reduction in total income (Sánchez-Páramo and Narayan 2020) compared to 35.4% in the current study this difference may be due to that our respondents have high level of education (most of them are working in medical field) and those with lower levels of education are more likely to lose their jobs (Sánchez-Páramo and Narayan 2020).
Regarding to the change of household spending due to COVID-19, 49.8% of households had increase in spending (mean = 1215.65 L.E./month, SD = 560.83) while 14.8% had decrease in spending (mean = 1702.7 L.E./month, SD = 989.24). The reason for this decrease can clarify as that many activities had been stopped or delayed due to COVID-19 pandemic.
From Income, Expenditure and Consumption survey, the average annual expenditure of the family on food and drink in Egypt is 37.1%, 33.9% in urban, and 40.2% in rural of the total annual expenditure, which is the largest percentage of the family’s expenditure (Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics 2019). The present study has similar results, the increasing in grocery spending was the dominated item during COVID-19 pandemic, has the maximum average cost change (mean = 707.2 L.E./month, SD = 530.7) compared to other items which can be understand that with more time spent at home, more food we eat which led to spend more money. Moreover, physicians stated that more people reported unexpected weight gain during the COVID-19 pandemic (Sweet 2020).
Concerning regression tree, the minimum average extra cost in household spending per month was 217 L.E., while the maximum average extra cost was 1386 L.E., this result can be validated by comparing it with the change in household spending per month (min = 500 L.E., max = 2000 L.E.).
Limitation
Due to COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face data collection was difficult to do, and therefore, snowball sampling technique was implemented to recruit individuals, highly educated only. Thus, this result can be generalized only among highly educated people.
Recommendation
A phone survey is needed to be conducted to recruit all different groups in the community.
Conclusion
The effect of COVID-19 pandemic in households spending varies largely between households, it depends on what they do to prevent COVID-19.