̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Imperial College

Economic activity has halved during Spain’s coronavirus lockdown, study suggests

fpjl2 — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:57:10 +0000

A new analysis of 1.4 billion anonymised credit and debit card transactions during the first three months of 2020 shows that spending in Spain post-lockdown was an average of 49% lower than the same period the previous year.

Economists from the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Imperial College in the UK worked with the Spanish bank BBVA, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, to study the 'real-time evolution' of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is an unprecedented dataset of millions of everyday transactions, revealing the underlying costs of the coronavirus crisis,” said study co-author Vasco Carvalho, Professor of Macroeconomics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and director of its INET Institute.

“We can see in high resolution the impact of extreme mobility restrictions on a major western economy. We find an abrupt and persistent decline in spending during lockdown, amounting to about half of what we might normally expect.”

̽��ֱ��researchers found evidence of a major spending increase in the few days just before Spain’s lockdown began on the 14 March 2020, when daily expenditure growth shot up by 20 percentage points above average for the year.

Once lockdown began, daily spending halved on average. ̽��ֱ��researchers say that, while bank transaction data is 'substantially more volatile' than overall consumption by households in Spain, they are closely linked.

As such, a 'back-of-the-envelope calculation' for consumption movement during the pandemic suggests growth of just over 4% prior to lockdown dropped sharply to a -13% decline in average household consumption – a key indicator of GDP – once lockdown restrictions were in place.

“While considerable uncertainty surrounds these calculations, is seems hard to construct a scenario where average consumption of Spanish households is not declining somewhere between minus 10% and minus 15% during the period of lockdown,” said Carvalho.

̽��ֱ��dataset charts the dramatic shift to online purchasing once lockdown was enforced. While both offline and online spending fell overall, the decline at physical points of sale was massive. As such, online shopping increased its market share by about 50%.

̽��ֱ��detail in the anonymised transaction data allowed the researchers to analyse the best and worst performing types of goods and outlets as people adapted to their new lockdown lives.

While outlets unable to conduct business were obviously the worst hit – from bars to fashion retailers – the study shows that small local food shops and convenience stores benefited the most, increasing their market share more than even the 'Hipermercados', or superstores.

Other categories of spending that have seen market share grow during Spanish lockdown include mobile phone credit, as telecommunications become even more vital to social lives, as well as pharmacies and insurance.

“Spending on commodities related to basic necessities, such as foodstuffs and the pharmacy, more than doubled during the lockdown period, while trade in fashion or personal services declined heavily,” said Carvalho. “Restrictions to movement mean proximity to the customer is now of key importance.”

̽��ֱ��study found that – all together – the top 10 best performing spending categories during lockdown went from an average of 10% market share in the first two months of 2020 to 50% by late March.

̽��ֱ��economists also used anonymised geo-tagging of the transactions to study the economic effects of coronavirus on the different regions of Spain, as well as among the neighborhoods of one of its major cities.

Unlike the country’s autonomous regions, which all followed a similar pattern, economic activity evolved very differently within Madrid’s postcodes during the crisis. “Those neighborhoods where there were more sick and infected people saw substantial declines in spending,” said Carvalho.

“Within a big city, inequality in disease burden appears to be linked to inequality in economic burden.”

Study co-author Professor Sevi Rodriguez Mora, of the ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh’s School of Economics, said: “Over the coming weeks governments will grapple with how to relax social distancing measures, but have few means of understanding the impact of diﬀerent policies on economic activity.

“Transaction data can provide immediate feedback on how spending patterns across space and sectors react to restriction measures, but also their relaxation.”

“Given that this seems to be happening in Spain before the rest of Europe and America, whatever happens in Spain will show us what we should expect everywhere else."

Álvaro Ortiz, Head of Big Data at BBVA Research, added: “Tracking these kind of events in real time and high definition provides an important strategic advantage for policy makers, as they can react more quickly to limit the economic damage.”

̽��ֱ��new research is published as a Cambridge-INET working paper on the Institute’s dedicated COVID-19 research page.

How you can support Cambridge's COVID-19 research effort

Donate to support COVID-19 research at Cambridge

Almost one and a half billion spending transactions reveal 'real-time' reactions of consumers in a major western economy during the nation’s peak pandemic period.

Within a big city, inequality in disease burden appears to be linked to inequality in economic burden

Vasco Carvalho

Nemo

A deserted Grand Via, in the heart of Madrid, a week after the lockdown started.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

From Mexican wave to retinal wave: why sharing data is good for science

jfp40 — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 10:40:34 +0000

Now, researchers at Cambridge, York, Newcastle and Imperial College London have developed a system allowing neurophysiologists to share raw data with each other, something they hope will generate new discoveries in the field. ̽��ֱ��results are published in the journal GigaScience.

̽��ֱ��first type of data they collected and standardised are recordings of so called ‘retinal waves’. During early development, retinal neurons generate signals that rapidly spread across from one cell to another, much like a Mexican wave in a football stadium. These patterns of activity are thought to help forge the neural connections from the eye to the brain.

To record retinal waves, scientists use multielectrode arrays (tiny electrical devices). In this research, the team took 366 recordings from 12 different studies published between 1993 and 2014, converted them all to HDF5 – a standard open source format – and published them in a web-based ‘virtual laboratory’ called CARMEN.

According to lead author Dr Stephen Eglen from the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute: “Unlike other fields such as genomics, there hasn’t been much public data sharing in neuroscience, which could be because the data are heterogeneous and hard to annotate, or because researchers are reluctant to share data with a competitor.”

But Eglen believes there is much to be gained by a more cooperative approach. “There are two main benefits to sharing,” he said. “As well as leading to other collaborations and more interesting research, it also means that other people can check what you’ve done, which leads to more robust research. And if the taxpayer funds research, then I think it’s important for those results to be publicly available.”

CARMEN was a pilot project funded by the EPSRC, and is now supported by the BBSRC.

From the way we learn, to how our memories are made and stored, the workings of our brains depend on connections forged between billions of neurons, yet much about how our nervous system develops remains a mystery.

There are two main benefits to sharing. As well as leading to other collaborations and more interesting research, it also means that other people can check what you’ve done, which leads to more robust research.

Dr Stephen Eglen

Oyvind Solstad

Eye 9

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Cambridge in Davos

jfp40 — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 16:09:10 +0000

Professor Lord Martin Rees (Institute of Astronomy), Professor Julian Dowdeswell (Scott Polar Research Institute) and Professor Jon Hutton (UNEP-WCMC and Hughes Hall) will deliver an IdeasLab presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 24 January. Together, they will explore the technological and policy innovations that will help us adapt to a climate-changed world.

IdeasLabs are quick-fire visual presentations followed by workgroup discussion, and have proved a successful format for engaging various communities in academic thinking.

As a collaborator in research at Imperial College London, Professor Barbara Sahakian of the Cambridge Department of Psychiatry will also give a presentation, on cognitive stimulation and the ethical implications of drugs to enhance brain function.

̽��ֱ��World Economic Forum is an independent international organisation engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas; this year’s theme is ̽��ֱ��Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.

̽��ֱ��Forum will provide an opportunity for the Cambridge researchers to engage with decision-makers in business, NGOs and in public policy, and to highlight new ideas from Cambridge in responding to global challenges. Apart from the Annual Meeting, several Cambridge academics contribute to the World Economic Forum year-round, as members of Global Agenda Councils.

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor said “Cambridge academics are working in partnership with many organisations to help global society address some of the thorniest questions. I look forward to a productive engagement with Annual Meeting participants from every sector.”

/research

A delegation of Cambridge academics, led by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, is attending the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

Cambridge academics are working in partnership with many organisations to help global society address some of the thorniest questions.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz

World Economic Forum

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

̽��ֱ��shape of things to come

sj387 — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 08:37:30 +0000

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, industrialisation swept the globe and changed it forever: humanity mastered the art of transforming the world’s raw materials into the ‘stuff of the world’. Today, everything around us, from the cars we drive, to the goods we own and the clothes we wear is largely the product of industrial manufacturing.

But industrialisation also had an unintended effect on the global environment – contributing to the increasing burden of carbon emissions, pollution and waste – and it’s widely accepted that a new ‘green’ industrial revolution is urgently needed.

“It’s clear that current processes cannot be sustained indefinitely,” said Professor Steve Evans. “As well as the environmental effects, the world has a finite amount of natural resources, and current processes are probably only 10% efficient at converting them into usable product.”

Evans leads the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing, which connects systems engineers and business analysts at Cambridge’s Centre for Industrial Sustainability with researchers at Cranfield ̽��ֱ��, Imperial College and Loughborough ̽��ֱ��. ̽��ֱ��Centre is funded with £5.7 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Centre researchers work with multinational businesses such as Toyota, Unilever and M&S to develop the knowledge and tools that will help manufacturers navigate their way through the complexities of designing sustainable industrial processes in the long term.

“To live well, experts think that we must be able to manufacture what we need using less than a quarter of the current bio-capacity. What this means is a reduction of 75–90% in how much carbon-based energy and resources our industrial systems currently use,” said Evans. “And to achieve this will mean a complete reshaping of how we manufacture.”

His vision extends all the way to a future in which factories could have a net positive effect on the environment: “Part of the work we are doing on configurations would suggest that by the 2050s the air and water leaving factories might be cleaner than what’s going in. A greater number will either use local materials or grow the materials they use – perhaps as nanostructures or using green chemistry. This will fundamentally change scale and location decisions for factories to the point where they will be so advantageous that people will want them at the end of their street.”

Developing ideas of how eco-factories could look in the future is one aspect of the research carried out by the Centre. However, these are long-term visions, and the researchers recognise not only the complexities of change but also that the “window of opportunity for action is rapidly closing.” One key focus of their research agenda, therefore, is to understand how industries can improve their efficiency and environmental performance now, without changing current products and processes.

“How can you find out how efficient a factory can be? You just ask common sense questions,” said Evans. “We go into the factories to collect examples of sustainable industrial activity, identify new courses of action, and then publish these as case study reports.” A database of over 1,000 effective practices in industrial sustainability has been compiled and will be generally available later this year.

For Toyota, for example, the researchers discovered that significantly better industrial performance is possible through innovative thinking and careful planning without relying on the development of a ‘step change’.

Toyota operate nine manufacturing sites in Europe ranging from engine manufacture through to vehicle assembly. “Toyota took the route of developing action plans with challenging targets to reduce environmental impact – recycling waste water, sending zero waste to landfill and so on – and focused on individual aspects of manufacturing to develop best practice. By adopting these principles, they reduced the energy needed to make cars across their European factories by 44% in five years.”

“Some factories are noticeably more efficient than others,” Evans added. “We want to know why, and whether they are squeezing every last drop from best practice. If not, how much further can they go and what can competitor factories learn from this?”

Other companies studied by the team have focused their steps on improving environmental performance on packaging reduction (Philips), shifting operations from a product-based system to one in which it provides a service (Xerox), and building a new energy-efficient production facility (Adnams brewery).

“Understanding how far you can push current systems is the most urgently needed step. But technological development is also essential to achieve the significant changes in efficiency that we need,” said Evans. To help this agenda, the Centre is also looking at the technology needed to manage factories. One software tool they have built – THERM (for THrough-life Energy and Resource Modelling) – models the way that energy, materials and water can flow around factories. “Traditionally, these processes are considered as secondary to modelling production of the product and yet they are integral to approaching sustainability at a factory level.”

̽��ֱ��THERM project, funded by the Technology Strategy Board, gathered a team of practitioners (Toyota and Airbus), academics (Cranfield ̽��ֱ�� and De Montfort ̽��ֱ��) and software developers (Integrated Environmental Solutions) to create the software tool, now available to industry. ̽��ֱ��tool integrates the modelling of manufacturing processes within their environment – the factory building – to identify system-wide opportunities to reduce resource consumption, carbon emissions and waste generated.

“ ̽��ֱ��greatest opportunity to reduce the environmental impact of an industrial system comes about when we consider the system as a whole, because the optimisation of any one part is ultimately constrained by other aspects,” explained Evans, who is a member of the Foresight lead expert group that is combining the latest scientific evidence with futures analysis to help policy makers consider the Future of Manufacturing for the Government Office for Science.

Evans and his team believe that this ‘systems thinking’ approach is crucial. “ ̽��ֱ��evidence we have seen from case studies shows that sub-system approaches can dramatically improve sustainability. But to help future generations meet the needs of humanity within the carrying capacity of the planet it will be important to develop the know-how to enable changes across the whole industrial system. Such a system is likely to look very different to today’s global industry. We believe that manufacturing will change its shape.”

Researchers are providing a vision for creatively rethinking how the manufacturing industry can perform sustainably in a changing world.

This will fundamentally change scale and location decisions for factories to the point where they will be so advantageous that people will want them at the end of their street

Steve Evans

̽��ֱ��District

Factory

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Share and share alike

lw355 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:30:59 +0000

In today’s climate of cut-backs and austerity measures, opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs are sought after. With this in mind, a new resource launched today by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge aims to improve research management by making greater use of existing equipment and facilities, and by sharing these between universities wherever possible.

̽��ֱ��online Research Facilities and Equipment Database will help academics access information about facilities, equipment and research services across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Moreover, as the database expands, researchers will be able to look for and use equipment across five partner universities in the project – Cambridge, Imperial College, ̽��ֱ�� College London, and the Universities of Oxford and Southampton.

̽��ֱ��initiative is part of a drive by the Research Councils UK to increase the effectiveness of equipment use. Since May 2011, universities have been required to check with other peer institutions to see if there is an opportunity to share equipment prior to submission of grant applications. ̽��ֱ��database will facilitate this process and help researchers make a stronger case for new research facilities and equipment in grant applications.

Led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Research Office and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Equipment Project has already amassed information on over 300 high-value research facilities and equipment, including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometers, a Genome Sequencer FLX Instrument, Deep Reactive-Ion Etching systems and confocal laser scanning microscopes.

Importantly, the database neither monitors nor controls access to these facilities and equipment, with access remaining at the equipment owner’s discretion. However, each record in the searchable database includes contact information and, as a further time-saving measure, an indication of the level of its current usage ranging from ‘very low’ to ‘fully-utilised’.

Professor Lynn Gladden, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research commented: ‘ ̽��ֱ��Equipment Project has been an excellent example of research-intensive southern universities working together to pool resources at a time of significant funding constraints. We hope that this will be a useful tool for our researchers for many years to come. Sharing research equipment is not a simple matter, nor is it always feasible and it certainly requires trust between the different researchers involved.

“Yet, allowing others access to equipment has, in the past, helped to strengthen burgeoning research collaborations and, occasionally, even led to serendipitous collaborative research findings. With budgetary constraints likely to continue, tools such as these are invaluable if we are to support our world-class researchers accomplish their intellectual endeavours with the best resources available.”

For more information about the Equipment Project and the Research Facilities and Equipment Database please visit www.equipment.admin.cam.ac.uk

A new resource launched today by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will help researchers seek out and access high-value equipment across five universities.

Wilberth Solano

Surface profile of a spall in a bearing steel

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes