Ukrainian people on the move, in graphs

Up till now, I’ve been thinking that the Google Mobility Reports are nice and up-to-date. Indeed, for the kind of economic analysis I often do, they are indeed an improvement on national statistics in terms of timeliness.

Of course, now that we are following the news on an hourly basis, it’s rather frustrating that the mobility data is “only” available with a 4-day delay. Also, we are in the middle of various spring holidays in many Central and Eastern European countries, so interpreting the data is a little challenging. But I thought I’d post it anyway.

The chart shows average weekly mobility at transit stations in Ukraine’s neighbouring countries until Saturday 26th February 2022. [Data for Ukraine itself is a couple more days delayed — so I’ll post about it in about a weeks’ time.] The countries are ordered counter-clockwise from North (Belarus) to West (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary) to South (Romania, Moldova).

From what I can decipher, it does look as if there’s a significant tick-up in mobility — some of which one could attribute to people coming across from Ukraine — at least in Belarus, Poland and Slovakia.

Google also provides regional data for Poland, and there the pattern is more visible: for regions bordering Ukraine, Lubelskie and Podkarpackie, transit mobility (relative to January/February 2020 baseline) on Saturday 26th of February was up by +24% and +59%, respectively. [In fact, I may post about those separately, once I’ve updated my Python script to download the separate regions, rather than country average data, for Poland.]