How Covid-19 Is Impacting Your Household Budget?

However, the effect was more pronounced in rural compared to urban areas. This is surprising because it runs counter to our earlier finding that rural households were more efficient at managing their resources compared to urban ones.
It is possible that urban households were more informed on how well the government was acting to arrest the virus spread and hence felt more confident about their future.
Another possible reason is that there was a steeper drop in real estate prices due to reduced demand in urban areas, which might have presented more opportunities for urban households. This conclusion is borne out by the fact that wealthy individuals — those owning multiple cars and/or whose income increased — had much higher aspiration to buy a house during Covid times, likely because the lower real estate prices offered them an investment opportunity.