Renda, emprego e atividade econômica: consequências da COVID-19 sobre o transporte urbano de passageiros

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic, which began in 2019 in China, quickly spread around the world, proving to be one of the greatest health challenges of this century. In Brazil, in addition to the health crisis, the Covid-19 outbreak aggravated the economic situation in which the country found itself. Several sectors of the Brazilian economy were affected, including tourism activities, the creative economy, urban passenger transportation, and air travel. In this research mote, this monograph seeks to evaluate the consequences of Covid-19 on income, employment, and Brazilian economic activity, and especially to analyze the urban passenger transportation sector in Brazil with the health crisis of Covid-19. In particular, the paper makes an exploratory analysis of the service crisis that has been occurring in the pre-Covid-19 crisis period, due to fare policy, the current financing model, the loss of passenger demand over the years, the incentives given to private transportation in order to have intermodal substitution from public to private transportation, among other reasons. These analyses can be adequately captured through an exploratory analysis of data from several national surveys. To this end, this work uses the information from the National Household Sample Survey - PNAD COVID-19, prepared by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in order to disclose the results of a broad set of indicators. Also used in the analyses will be the latest edition of the Brazilian survey by the National Confederation of Transport (CNT), which deals in a detailed way with the unfolding of the pandemic on all transport activities, including analyses for air transport that also suffered with the pandemic restriction measures. The researches of the National Association of Urban Transportation Companies (NTU) make up the database to characterize the scenario, as well as other studies in the national literature. The conclusive results showed how the urban transport sector was affected, since 95% of the urban transport companies verified a reduction in demand, 93% pointed out a reduction in sales and about 55% of the companies had to apply for credit in the year 2021, leading to more than 60 thousand layoffs in the sector. In the national economic activity, the results pointed to a contraction of 4.1% of the GDP, the largest annual decline since the historical series began in 1996, interrupting a growth of three consecutive years, demonstrating the seriousness of the pandemic. Therefore, more effective public policies are needed in order to save the sector.