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We’ve been tracking mobility data across both DM and EM for a while, but last week we integrated and expanded our tracker to include Google and Apple mobility data in addition to our TomTom, CityMapper and Flight Radar data. The challenge is to represent the data in an accessible way, so we’ve decided to go down the heatmap route. We’re tracking almost 50 countries and we try to have, at least, a few mobility measures for each.
The radar chart below shows a quick summary of a number of the mobility measures for DM. Since last week we have extended our traffic data collection which now spans across almost all COVID tracker countries. While no country is fully back to normal yet, there were slight improvements since last week. However, most improvements happened in countries where activity was already above average (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Germany and the Netherlands). Even the US made some improvements in mobility, although coastal cities remained around the lowest activity levels in our rankings. Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, NZ and the UK also marked another week where activity is far from normal.
The two tables on the next page go into more details for each country. For example, for the US, Apple shows mobility around 60% of normal (a roughly 10pp improvement since last week), while Google remains around 70% of normal. The TomTom and CityMapper data, which are skewed to coastal cities, maintain low values and don’t go above 24% and 8% of normal, respectively. Flight data is tracked only in weekly smoothed averages and shows stagnation relative to last week.
Mobility in EM also remains roughly similar to last week, with Korea, Taiwan, HK and China being the closest to normal, followed by Central Europe. In aggregate, the numbers have slightly improved for all countries since last week, including the most affected countries. Singapore, India, the Philippines, Turkey, South Africa and most of Latin America continue to record mobility far below normal but they too are showing some signs of improvement.
Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.
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