Heterogeneity in the impact of Covid-19 on the sales of microenterprises in Chile at the municipal level

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has had enormous consequences on the world's economy. During 2020, Chile was a country enormously affected by the number of infections with an unfavorable evolution of the pandemic at national level. This led the health's authority to decree on several occasions the confinement of the population, which consequently meant that many companies had to cease their functions. The objective of this paper is to analyze the existence of spatial heterogeneity in the determinants of the variation of microenterprise sales at the municipal level in Chile, with special emphasis on the effects of confinement and other sociodemographic variables. For this purpose, an adaptive kernel geographically weighted regression approach was used. The results show that there are negative effects of both the number of cases and confinement at the municipal level, with areas particularly affected in the center and north of the country. The results are a contribution to the understanding of how the pandemic affected microenterprises during 2020 and to the generation of strategies at the municipal level.