Imagine that you are a reporter prepare a questionnaire to access the financial impact of covid 19 pandemic on retailers and small businesses.
Make a questionnaire of 6 questions.
Only write if you know the answer. Otherwise don't write.
Don't mind the subject I didn't knew which one to pick(it's Gk question)
Pls write according to the question
Answers
Answer:
The retail sector is of paramount importance across OECD countries. It operates as a gateway to consumers from upstream sectors, accounts for almost 5% of GDP, and employs about 1 in 12 workers. COVID-19 has dramatically disrupted the sector, with the shock differing massively between brick-and-mortar versus online shops, essential versus non-essential stores, and small versus large retailers.
Five policy measures that countries need to take now for the benefit of firms, workers and customers to shield the retail sector from the effects of the crisis and enhance its resilience are as follows:
Ensure that liquidity assistance schemes are accessible to retail firms, irrespective of their size.
Help essential retailers deal with labour supply shortages, in particular by smoothing demand-supply matching for retail jobs and providing guidance on health and safety standards.
Support retail firms to implement social distancing measures.
Ensure that competition in the sector remains sufficient in the aftermath of the crisis.
Increase retail firms’ resilience by diversifying their sales channels, in particular by helping small brick-and-mortar retailers go online.
The importance and specificities of the retail sector
The mitigation measures aimed at slowing the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic taken over the past few months have directly affected the supply, demand and daily operations of the retail sector. The retail sector includes all resale activities of new and used goods (not including motor vehicles and motorcycles) mainly to the general public for personal or household consumption or use.
The overall impact of retailing is large, due to a number of factors. The retail sector is an economic heavyweight: on average across OECD economies, about 1 in 12 workers are employed in retail, and the sector accounts for almost 5% of GDP. Moreover, it mainly serves final demand, and thus occupies an important position in value chains both as a provider to households and as an outlet for upstream sectors. It also often complements activities in other hard-hit sectors, e.g. tourism. In addition, the retail sector is very labour intensive, so any disruptions have disproportionate employment consequences. The sector also relies on low-wage and part-time, on-call and gig workers that are not well-covered by traditional social protection measures, which further strengthens the social consequences of the crisis in this sector.
Figure 1. Change in demand for essential versus non-essential retail goods
Growth of Google searches for retail items between April 2019 and April 2020 (%)

Notes: This graph reports the growth in searches for essential and non-essential retail items (normalized by the overall volume of searches), defined as the unweighted average of the growth rates of the relevant categories. Essential items include the following categories: “Consumer Electronics”, “Grocery & Food Retailers” and “Pharmacy” (see del Rio-Chanona et al., 2020). Non-essential items include the following categories: “Luxury Goods”, “Home Appliances”, “Home Furnishings”, “Luggage & Travel Accessories”, “Apparel” and “Gifts & Special Event Items”. Google searches are a rough proxy for demand, and should be interpreted with great care. In particular, the increase in searches for essential retail items may partly reflect a shift to online shopping for these items, rather than a pure increase in demand. These data have however the merit to be available for a large number of countries and to allow comparisons.
Sources: Google Trends and OECD computations.
At the same time, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the retail sector is heterogeneous and depends on the combined effect of three characteristics. First, the effect of social distancing measures on individual retail businesses depends on whether they are deemed essential. On the one hand, most non-essential retail activities have been shut down; essential retail businesses, on the other hand, often operate in difficult conditions, including labour supply shortages, major disruptions in supply chains and working conditions, and sometimes