The COVID-19 Places Economic Recovery Index (CoPERI) Project

The economic and health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been evenly distributed, with different parts of the country affected differently, based on their households, occupations and local businesses characteristics.

This in turn will have implications for how these different parts of the country handle the post-pandemic economic recovery, as the public health restrictions are gradually lifted.

Recovery policy may miss the unique challenges faced both across and within different regions and cities in the UK, failing to address the specific needs of places. Local and regional policy makers need the tools to ensure that they are able to identify what parts of their local economies will struggle to recover in the wake of the pandemic, and to guide the delivery of appropriate place-based recovery policy to support every place in the UK.

Thanks to funding from UKRI Research England and a collaboration between the University of Sheffield and Sheffield City Region, the CoPERI project seeks to address these challenges by identifying the places that will most struggle to recover following the Covid-19 pandemic, analysing what are the main threats to economic recovery both for households and businesses.

Using granular data at the neighbourhood level, the CoPERI project has developed several metrics to identify neighbourhoods that are at risk of economic hardship, based on different measures of households and businesses economic health and vulnerability, which combined together result in the Covid-19 Places Economic Recovery Index (CoPERI) calculated for more than 7000 neighbourhoods across England and Wales. These are summarised and easily accessible through a new interactive online dashboard that provides information to assist policy makers in assessing the economic risks faced by their local areas in the wake of the Covid-19 public health pandemic.

Different regions, cities and neighbourhoods will face unique challenges in the post-covid economic recovery. The COPERI dashboard gives the possibility to map and track the economic vulnerability of neighbourhoods within a region, zooming into the granular differences of local economies to better understand how places are composed and react to this unprecedented shock. These indexes will enable local policymakers to precisely identify neighbourhoods at risk of economic hardship post pandemic, understanding the main source of vulnerability, in order to tailor the policy response to the needs of each specific local community.