The impact of the pandemic on the retail industry sales in South Africa: A Box-Jenkins approach

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the South African retail industry sales using the seasonal autoregressive moving average (SARIMA) from the time series analysis tool pack called Box-Jenkins methodology. The model with the best fit to the total monthly retail sales series is the SARIMA(0,1,1)(0,1,0)12 model as it has the lowest values of the model selection and adequacy measures such as the Akaike’s information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, root mean square error and the mean absolute percentage error. This study concludes that the South African retail industry is remarkably resilient sector because while it was unstable during lockdown, the total retail sales recovered to their pre-intervention levels as soon as less strict lockdown levels were implemented.