Business Activity Trends
Business Activity Trends help quantify how businesses are affected by crisis events around the world such as natural disasters and disease outbreaks. In the COVID-19 context, these trends can be used by economists and other researchers to understand the rate at which businesses remain open or have closed in response to stay at home orders or lockdowns.
Photo by Brooke Cagle/Unsplash
Features
Business Page data
This dataset provides two daily metrics for the businesses inside a crisis-affected region. First, it provides the aggregate number of public posts on Facebook Business Pages compared to pre-crisis activity levels. Second, it provides the aggregate number of people who are visiting businesses in-person also compared to pre-crisis levels. Together, these metrics help quantify how businesses are affected by crisis events across the world such as disease outbreaks or natural disasters.
Research Collaboration
Business Activity Trends were developed in collaboration with Robert Eyre, Flavia De Luca and Filippo Simini from the University of Bristol based on their method to measure recovery of small businesses after natural hazard events.
Privacy
Only scaled values of business page post counts and visits are contained in this dataset and all data is aggregated.
Who Uses Business Activity Trends
Universities and researchers
Researchers can analyze the downtime of business sectors in near real-time without the need for natural language processing or computationally intensive methods.
Non-profits
When responding to a crisis, organizations can analyze the time series of business activity before and after an event. This provides a reliable method to quantify the rate of recovery or continued disruption after an emergency and can be compared across business sectors. Organizations then can better decide how to distribute resources in collaboration with local governments.
Contact Us
If you have any questions or if you would like to request access to this data, please email disastermaps@fb.com.