Observe carefully, there's a reduction in this activities you speak about people still doing, it's just a minority of the population still engaging in this activities while the majority is just struggling to survive. Don't also forget life is a continuous process, people will always live irrespective of how the economy situation is but how to identify if things are going great or bad is the number of people involved.

Humans unconsciously spends when there's surplus and that's very evident in every society, this is one flaw humanity has so when you don't see that in their numbers just know things aren't going great in that economy. Those  doing this things you speak about are the individual that gets their money illegally or have surplus and don't mind wasting them because they know more are on the way coming. Also there are those that saved during the raining days but they won't waste their funds in such manners.