News & Updates
How to Make the Most of Our Federal Relief Funds
It is often said that our values are reflected in what we budget, what we spend our money on. The COVID-19 pandemic has been the ultimate test of that well-known adage. With overwhelming need in every corner of our communities and each sector of our economy, there was no shortage of what to fund — but with so little time, the challenge was how to get the funds out quickly to those who needed them most.
Tracking the Coronavirus and the Federal Funding
In Hawai‘i Magazine’s “Hawai‘i Gives Back” Series, Hawai‘i Data Collaborative’s (HDC) Nick Redding is featured in “Tracking the Coronavirus and the Federal Funding” contributed by Hawai‘i Community Foundation, where he discussed:
Why HDC works to make data accessible;
How COVID created a shock to the system that has helped people see the value in data;
What we should be doing now to prepare for the next disruption.
Hawai‘i Economics and Economists In the Spotlight
In Hawaii Business Magazine’s December 2020 issue, Hawai‘i Data Collaborative’s Nick Redding and Kendrick Leong were featured in “Hawai‘i Economics and Economists in the Spotlight” by Sterling Higa, where they discuss how HDC first began as a project intended to produce an index of well-being for Hawai‘i, how the learnings from the project expanded HDC’s work to include unlocking the potential of publicly available data to support better decision-making, vulnerabilities in the state’s data culture that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to bear, and why we must be thoughtful with the economic indicators we focus on as it relates to how we define “economic recovery” (as discussed in a previous post).
The Hawaii Variable: A Data-Based Discussion About the Economy
Hawaii Data Collaborative’s Research Specialist, Kendrick Leong, joined Honolulu Civil Beat on a panel for a data-based discussion around the impacts of COVID-19 to Hawaii’s economy. Some of the main points Kendrick highlighted were the difficulty in finding county and sub-county data to aid decision making on neighbor islands; examining economic indicators in the context of COVID data; reiterating that economic recovery is value-laden; and, identifying groups that may be left out of federal aid spending.
Moderating the discussion was Yoohyun Jung, data reporter for Honolulu Civil Beat; other panelists included Dr. Carl Bonham, Executive Director of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization (UHERO), and Dr. Peter Fuleky, Research Economist at UHERO.
Metrics Maketh Man: The Economic Indicators We Track Define Us
The challenge of summarizing the entire economy through individual indicators is akin to perfectly defining the word “economy” itself. There is an ongoing academic dispute over whether composite indicators or indices are inherently good or bad. Critics object to the arbitrary nature of the weighting process, or the extent to which the performance of individual indicators contributes to movement in a single “score” or composite indicator. Regardless, indices are powerful in their ability to showcase in one score what might not be apparent from examining multiple individual indicators in isolation.
In this post, we take one step back from the debate and instead draw attention to why indicators are selected, rather than whether they should have been selected or combined at all. Our values as a society are revealed in the curation of economic indicators (whether for the Brookings dashboard or UHERO’s Economic Pulse) – we implicitly prioritize certain metrics by elevating them to a position within a dashboard or index. Let’s take a deeper look at a few specific indicators that illustrate this point.
Checking Up on Hawaii’s Economic Health: Existing Metrics Tell Us Only Pieces of the Story
Although measures of GDP, unemployment, and retail and food sales all help assess the state of the local economy, there are a few caveats. One is data timeliness, or the schedule in which data is published and disseminated. GDP, reported quarterly, and retail and food sales, generally reported monthly, are often too slow to inform policy and planning decisions that need to be made and adjusted daily or weekly. However, Hawaii does do a good job in tracking unemployment claims weekly through the Hawaii Workforce Infonet, at least giving us a sense of the local job market. Another is data completeness, or how comprehensive a dataset is for answering the question at hand – in this case: how well is Hawaii’s economy recovering? Without one single identifiable metric for economic recovery, we need to look at other indicators beyond GDP, unemployment, and retail and food sales.
E Komo Mai: How Do We Reopen Hawaii to Travel?
Getting the visitor industry back on its feet is one of the state’s top priorities. But how? Given what we know about the virulence of COVID-19, the risk of future outbreaks is clearly tied to movement of people and the introduction of large populations from outside the state.
(Updated) Modeling Suggests Substantial Increases In The Financial Vulnerability Of Hawaii's Families
Although the specifics of COVID-19’s economic effects on Hawaii remain unclear, our modeling suggest impacts on households of all income levels. Based on preliminary results, we estimate that nearly 134,000—approximately 30 percent—of all Hawaii households stand to bear a significant loss of income (defined as a loss in household income greater than 25 percent) due to the effects of the pandemic on the local economy.
Small Business May Play a Not-So-Small Part in Restarting Hawaii's Economy
The two largest industries in Hawaii by number of workers—accommodation and food services and retail trade—have been among the hardest hit by the economic impacts of COVID-19. The effect on those two industries was overwhelmingly felt by small businesses, which contribute billions of dollars to Hawaii’s economy each year.
Anonymized Testing Outcomes Database (ATOB) Could Increase Precision of Reopening Policies in Hawaii
An anonymized testing outcomes database (ATOB) that provides daily aggregated counts of asymptomatic as well as symptomatic cases could save Hawaii an additional $300 million in economic costs over non-ATOB reopening strategies.
Finding the Trade-Off Sweet Spot: Relatively Modest Health System Investments Could Reduce Hawaii’s Economic Losses by Billions
We used our Hawaii Population Model to explore the interplay between the medical resources needed to combat COVID-19 and their associated economic impacts, given current conditions over the next two months. We ran scenarios of every possible combination of health system parameters, with their associated economic costs, iterating and reiterating the model until every combination of infection mitigation strategies had been tested.