Is COVID-19 Causing More Business Closures in Poor and Minority Neighborhoods?

We are starting to understand the magnitude of economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic. Current estimates cover the national or state level, but tell us little about how massive business closures may be affecting urban vitality at the intrametropolitan level. A particular concern is whether urban areas with high poor or minority populations are more deeply affected. This paper combines InfoGroup Historic Business Data and Google Map API to analyze business closures at the neighborhood level in Franklin County, Ohio, encompassing the Columbus Metropolitan Area. As expected, retail and restaurant sectors had the highest number of closures, but closure rates were higher in other sectors. Descriptive and multivariate analyzes reveal that downtown Columbus has been severely affected, but no disadvantaging effect for communities of color or neighborhoods with concentrations of poor residents is found to be statistically significant.

The Business Reinvention of Japan: How to Make Sense of the New Japan and Why It Matters: Ulrike Schaede, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, xiii, 261 pp. + notes, references, index, ISBN 978-1-503-61225-9, hb, https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32247

Much debate about Japan in the past two decades has been about its lost decade or causes for its stagnation;in short, Japan has been forgotten by the world. Japan remodeled: How government and industry are reforming Japanese capitalism. The Business Reinvention of Japan: How to Make Sense of the New Japan and Why It Matters: Ulrike Schaede, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, xiii, 261 pp. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Japanese Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

COVID-19 exacerbates unequal food access.

Inequality to food access has always been a serious problem, yet it became even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated social inequality and reshaped essential travel. This study provides a holistic view of spatio-temporal changes in food access based on observed travel data for all grocery shopping trips in Columbus, Ohio, during and after the state-wide stay-at-home period. We estimated the decline and recovery patterns of store visits during the pandemic to identify the key socio-economic and built environment determinants of food shopping patterns. The results show a disparity: during the lockdown, store visits to dollar stores declined the least, while visits to big-box stores declined the most and recovered the fastest. Visits to stores in low-income areas experienced smaller changes even during the lockdown period. A higher percentage of low-income customers was associated with lower store visits during the lockdown period. Furthermore, stores with a higher percentage of white customers declined the least and recovered faster during the reopening phase. Our study improves the understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on food access disparities and business performance. It highlights the role of COVID-19 and similar disruptions on exposing underlying social problems in the US.