Different Impacts of Coronavirus Pandemic on Different Income Household and Contrasting Benefits from Digital Transformation behind It

This paper reports the findings from the Public Opinion Survey on COVID-19, which NHK has conducted three times in a row at the same time each year since November 2020, focusing on the gap in household income for deeper analysis. The key findings were as follows. Regarding the change in their lives due to the coronavirus pandemic, respondents who perceive the change as “negative” exceed those who perceive it as “positive” in every household-income group, but the higher the household income, the higher the percentage of those citing “positive,” with the most noticeable reason being “teleworking such as working from home has become available.” The survey actually shows that the higher the income, the more people practice teleworking. The survey also found that the higher the income, the more people utilize digital tools to prevent infection in their daily lives, and the more likely to see the advancing digital transformation in the entire society positively. Meanwhile, the lower the household income, the more people answer that their income has “decreased” due to the pandemic. One of the factors for this is assumed to be that the impact of the pandemic was larger on those with occupations of relatively lower annual income, such as in “sales and service industries.” Furthermore, the survey found that the lower the income, the more likely people feel psychological damage, such as “feeling down.” The chronological comparison of the past years reveals that the higher the income, the higher the increase in those satisfied with their lives, with the gap between higher- and lower-income households widening year by year. Presumably, such results were attributed to the spread of teleworking among higher-income groups and the quicker recovery of the income that had been declined at an early stage of the pandemic than among other groups. These data suggest that it will be imperative to promptly provide economic and other support for lower-income groups at an early phase of a new pandemic that may occur in the future.