COVID-19 Impact on Ethanol Sales in Fuel Stations: An ITS Econometric Analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper provides estimates of the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on Brazilian Ethanol sales. To this end, weekly data on Ethanol sales volumes are analyzed through an ITS SARIMA model and a counterfactual analysis covering the 2019–2020. We find that the real effect of COVID-19 was a reduction above 77.97% in Brazil after the first COVID-19 death, in March 2020, and still a decrease of about 50.15% at the end of 2020. The empirical evidence confirms that the impact of the pandemic crisis, the counterfactual analysis allows estimating the real effect of COVID-19 is on average 3.76% greater than the observed against an index date reference. These results suggest that ethanol sales in Brazil were more affected than only when comparing previous results to the effects of the pandemic. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.