Data Collection — How did the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact the Chinese Economy?

1. Deciding on Topic & Initial Attempts at Data Collection

For my research project, I decided to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy of Shanghai and even China in general. When I first decided on the topic of my research project, I was unsure about what aspect of Chinese society should I investigate. However, as I began to gain some basic ideas on what type of data may reflect the economic situation through my parents’ assistance, I started to collect some data on the revenue & profits of companies that are usually reflective of the economic situation, mainly in the catering & delivery industries.

To begin with, I started with collecting data on the revenue of one of the largest takeout companies in China — Meituan (美团). Initially, I hoped to obtain some data on the number and average income of their riders, so I began diving into their annual financial reports to find possibly valuable data for my research. In the end, even though I didn’t find data regarding their riders, the financial reports shed some light on my research, and I later decided that the annual financial reports could be a good source of data for myself, as seen in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: Income and profit data collected from Meituan’s annual financial reports in recent years.

2. Beginning of Systematic Collection

As I began to have some clue on the type of data to collect, I turned to another industry that is likely reflective of the economic situation: Banking. Specifically, I wanted to investigate the corporate & personal loan data. To do this, I began finding the annual financial reports from the “4 Central Banks” of China — Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), Bank of Communications (BOCOM), and China Construction Bank (CCB), which recorded their annual income & loan data. Similarly, I recorded the data since 2017 in a spreadsheet using the same method. What’s different is that this time I also included the year-to-year change rates of the loan data seen in Fig. 2:

Fig 2: The annual corporate and personal loan data collected from the annual financial reports

At first, when collecting data from both Meituan and the 4 banks, I encountered 2 problems: First, the location of the information that I intended to obtain. At first, I had no idea where the annual reports of these companies were stored on their official websites and had to search for them on search engines. However, later I learned that there’s a page on the official website for these companies called “Investor Relationships”, which made my data collection process much easier. The second issue is with the discrepancies in counting methods: Sometime after collecting the data from Meituan, I realized that beginning with last year’s (2022) annual report, the method of calculating the income and profit of different sectors has been altered, and the data that I’m initially obtaining for is not explicitly stated in the report anymore. Therefore, the data that I recorded in the table above was an approximation based on data from 2021 as well as the year-to-year change rate that Meituan provided in the 2022 report.

3. Extensions into the Macro View of the Catering Industry

After finishing collecting data from the banking industry, I decided that my data on one company in the catering/delivery industry might not be adequately reflective of the whole catering and delivery industry. Therefore, I decided to go into a more macro view of the catering and delivery industry. From a website called CEIC Data, I found some data that contain data that reflect COVID-19’s impact on the economy of Shanghai in general quite well. Some of the indicators measured include restaurants’ purchases from non-self-delivery centers, the number of employees in the catering industry, and the business revenue.

Fig. 3: The total business revenue of the catering industry in Shanghai.

Fig. 4: Number of purchases from non-self-delivery centers.

The 2 figures, Fig. 3, and Fig. 4, that I included are all indicators that, in my opinion, are highly correlated with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The total business revenue and number of employees, as what would usually be expected, have been significantly impacted by COVID and experienced a significant drop in 2020. The number of purchases from non-self-delivery centers, however, is a bit more complicated: In 2020, the number of purchases of this type increased dramatically compared to the data in 2019. In my opinion, this is also due to the financial crisis caused by COVID, which forced the catering companies to purchase their materials from cheaper sources.