Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the finances of the business improvement districts in the United States and Canada

The COVID-19 pandemic generated challenges to fiscal governance at national, regional, local, and sub-local levels, as the economies at all these levels were impacted severely by the lockdowns and interruptions in economic transactions. We investigated the impacts of the pandemic on the sub-local areas known as business improvement districts (BIDs) in most states in the US and business improvement areas (BIAs) in some provinces of Canada, particularly on the annual total revenues of the management organizations of BIDs and BIAs and the percentages of their total revenues from property assessment. The results of our interrupted time-series analyses of the total revenues and percentages of them from assessments show that the COVID-19 pandemic did affect the finances of all the BIDs and BIAs in our analyses, but in different ways and in different time frames. Although there are no clear patterns in the results, they point to potential areas of research in the future.