ors has accounted for the continued strength of the gain in the first half of 2021. First, there have simply been fewer trading days lost or impaired due to lockdowns this year. Researchers at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government have been tracking the stringency of government Covid-19 countermeasures in 155 countries since the beginning of the pandemic. A stringency level of greater than 65 on a scale of 1-100 on any given day is equivalent to a whole country or substantial part of it being in lockdown. In Australia, that occurred on 76 days in the first seven months of 2021, compared with a staggering 97 days in the comparable period of 2020.  So you could say retailers benefited from three full weeks more trading in January-July 2021 than in January-July 2020. This is a little simplified, because different states had different experiences, but it is still a good broad indicator of what was driving retail. A second big reason for the retail sales improvement in 2021 is the gradual unwinding of household savings accumulated during the uncertain months of 2020. Massive government spending programs in 2020 fuelled the accumulation of about $200 billion in personal savings, which consumers dipped into as their optimism increased in the first half of this year.  A third reason for the gains in both years has been alluded to in a previous article of mine in Inside Retail: the closure of the international border has resulted in about $60 billion staying in the country that otherwise would have leaked overseas in foreign tourism by Australians. That number is offset only partly by the $30 million that visitors spend annually in Australia. According to my estimates, the boost to retail itself has been somewhere in the ballpark of $22 billion over the past 18 months.  So while the nation is still consumed with the pandemic heading into the fourth quarter, with lockdowns and political bun fights between state premiers raging on and on, the retail industry can already look back on the first seven months of 2021 with a lot of relief. After a bit of a horror stretch in 2020 for clothing and accessory retailers, department stores and the food service sector, the sales bounceback in 2021 has more than compensated.  For the clothing and accessories sector, the recovery has been extraordinary, at least if the ABS numbers are to be believed. In the first seven months of this year, sales have risen by 30.0 per cent, after falling 15.2 per cent in January-July 2020.  Cafes and restaurants also staged a recovery (up 23.2 per cent after an 18.7 per cent slide in 2020). For the other sectors, it’s been a period of consolidation. The gains for retail as a whole have been spread across the entire country. Considering the fact that retailers in 2019 weren’t exactly setting the world on fire, the whole pandemic period can be regarded, strangely, as something of a recovery.  But looking forward, the outlook is very uncertain. It should have been rosy. Between August 1 and December 31 of 2020, Australia’s Covid restrictions resulted in Oxford University’s stringency measure exceeding 65 for a staggering 102 days. If the country were expecting to be lockdown-free during the same months this year, then we’d be anticipating monumental year-on-year sales gains. Instead, it looks like it will be at best a wash, at worst a material decline. The unexpected loss of trading days and disruption to operations due to snap lockdowns by individual states, and now extended lockdowns in Victoria and NSW, is likely to result in depressed year-on-year sales figures that will be mitigated only somewhat by the long Victorian lockdown in the second half of 2020. This dragged-out situation has stimulated more activism on the part of Australia’s retail leadership, which until recently had been fairly quiet about the adverse effects of the Covid countermeasures. So far, state governments haven’t been particularly responsive. Let’s hope the Magnificent Seven are not followed by the Frightful Five.