Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Government Sales Tax Revenue

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a dramatic change in the way people, businesses and government dealt with their day-to-day operations. The virus was spreading at an exponential rate, causing several restrictions to be placed on a state, federal and global level, such as limitation in face-to face interactions, a decrease in travelling, and eating out. Substantially, that affected the economy, such as businesses shutting down, unemployment rising, and economic growth declining. With that in mind, it is comprehensive to make an assumption that it also affected the government in terms of their revenue aspect, specifically sales taxes. The questions that came to mind are: Did sales taxes decrease or increase during the peak pandemic year? Was their high impact on revenue in states that dealt with a lot more cases or less? Was there a correlation between the stringency index and the sales tax? In order to get answers for these interesting questions that arose, I decided to gather data from the Census website which consist of various data ranging from the state level sales tax to federal level sales tax. Furthermore, I also gathered data on the stringency index, in order to identify a correlation between the two variables.https://digitalcommons.jsu.edu/ce_jsustudentsymp_2023/1050/thumbnail.jp