Effects of the State of Emergency during the COVID-19 Pandemic on Tokyo Vegetable Markets

The state of emergency (SOE) period in Tokyo under the COVID-19 pandemic restricted people to staying in their homes and changed human mobility, which has impacted the major agricultural markets in Tokyo. In this research, we analyzed how the changes in people’s staying-at-home behaviors during the four SOE periods (7 April 2020–28 October 2021) in Tokyo affected the daily market prices of cabbage, tomato, Japanese radish, carrot, and potato. Using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, the study reveals that all the investigated vegetables except potatoes have a long-term relationship with the staying-at-home index. The long-term influence of staying-at-home behaviors on cabbage, tomato, radish, and carrot markets during the early SOE periods had a negative impact on these vegetable prices, indicating that an increase in the hours of staying-at-home as related to SOE measures might have decreased the demand for these vegetables. The negative impact of the stay-at-home index on vegetable prices lessened in the fourth SOE period, likely because more people did not remain in their homes. Moreover, the study findings reveal that, compared to less perishable vegetables, the price of perishable vegetables is more likely to have been affected by human mobility constraints during the pandemic. Therefore, agricultural policymakers should consider providing subsidies to producers based on the negative influence on market prices of perishable and less perishable vegetables in pandemic situations, such as COVID-19.