Swedish industries and the Corona crisis

Spoiler: in a previous post, I showed that most Swedish industries were growing in September 2021 compared to twelve months earlier. Even though Omicron is causing new disruptions, its effects are expected to be more limited according to the Economist. If this prediction is correct, we can look back and assess which Swedish industries that were hardest hit by the Corona crisis. I may have to regret that sentence…

To see how the different industries were impacted by the Corona crisis, I will below show the declines for the 46 different industries that were part of the Diffusion Index I calculated in the post mentioned above. I’ll look at differences in declines from peak to trough for all 46 industries. The different industries will be referred to by their NACE codes (https://nacev2.com/en ).

As mentioned in the above-mentioned post, Air Transportation Services (Nace H51) took the hardest hit. It declined by 93% from the last quarter of 2019 to its trough in June 2020. Other industries that were severely affected were contact- and labour-intensive industries such as Hotels and Restaurants, Sea Transportation Services, and Warehouses and Auxiliary Transportation Services, Art and Cultural Services, but also Motor Vehicles Industries and trade and repair services of such, c.f. Figure 1.

Figure 1. Peak to trough change in production for Swedish industries during the Corona crisis.

Source: Statistics Sweden, https://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/sv/ssd/START__NV__NV0006__NV0006A/PVI2015FastM07/

On the other end of the spectra, with relatively small changes, are Construction, Manufacturing of paper, Software developers and computer consultants, Courier Services and Retail Trade. Probably mostly on-line trade rather than brick and mortar.

Though the above graph is illustrative, one needs to look at developments over time to see how industries have fared since graphs for certain points of time may be misleading. Mining industries appear to be very hard hit. But graphing the Mining production over time shows that this is due to only the two last months. This could be due to several reasons related or unrelated to the Corona crisis, c.f. Figure 2.

Figure 2. Mining Industries’ production during the Corona crises.

Source: Statistics Sweden, https://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/sv/ssd/START__NV__NV0006__NV0006A/PVI2015FastM07/

Let’s hope the Economist is correct and that we have are on an upward trend. Otherwise, I might have to write another meaningless post about it.