Dean Jolliffe

A Profile of Poverty in Egypt

This paper presents a profile of poverty in Egypt for 1997. It assesses the magnitude of poverty and its distribution across geographic and socioeconomic groups, provides information on the characteristics of the poor, illustrates the heterogeneity amongst the poor, and helps identify empirical correlates of poverty. This poverty profile is constructed using data from the Egypt Integrated Household Survey (EIHS), which is a nationwide, multiple-topic household survey. One of the more striking set of findings relates to the differences between the poor and the non-poor in their educational attainments. Our results indicate a significant literacy and schooling gap between the poor and the non-poor. On average the poor have 2.6 fewer years of schooling than the non-poor, and their literacy rate is 27 percent lower than the non-poor. Our results also indicate that augmenting educational attainment of the poor does not require building more schools, but reducing the poor’s opportunity cost of attending schools and increasing their returns from extra schooling, both suggesting the importance of income generating activities as a policy instrument. Le present article dresse un profil de la pauvrete en Egypte pour l’annee 1997. Il evalue l’ampleur du phenomene de pauvrete et sa repartition entre les groupes geographiques et socio-economiques, presente les caracteristiques des pauvres, illustre l’heterogeneite des situations de pauvrete, et aide a identifier les correlats empiriques de la pauvrete. Ce profil de la pauvrete se fonde sur des donnees tirees de l’Enquete integree sur les menages en Egypte (EIHS), un sondage national portant sur une multiplicite de sujets. L’un des constats les plus marquants concerne les differences entre les pauvres et les non pauvres en matiere de resultats scolaires. Notre enquete revele un ecart significatif entre les taux d’alphabetisation et de frequentation scolaire des pauvres et des non pauvres. En moyenne, les pauvres vont 2,6 annees de moins a l’ecole que les non pauvres et leur taux d’alphabetisation est de 27 pour cent inferieur a celui des non pauvres. L’enquete revele egalement que pour ameliorer les performances scolaires des pauvres, il n’est pas necessaire de construire de nouvelles ecoles mais de reduire le cout d’opportunite de la frequentation scolaire pour les pauvres et d’accroitre le rendement de chaque annee supplementaire de frequentation, deux facteurs qui soulignent l’importance des activites generatrices de revenu en tant qu’instrument de politique.

Whose Education Matters in the Determination of Household Income? Evidence from a Developing Country*

This paper aims to answer how best to model education attainment, which is an individual-level variable, in household-level income functions. The accepted practice in the literature is to use the education level of the household head. This paper compares the head-of-household model to three competing models and concludes that the maximum or average level of education in the household is a better explanatory variable of household income. Least absolute deviations (LAD) estimators and censored least absolute deviations (CLAD) estimators are used to predict income. Standard errors, which are robust to violations of homoscedasticity and independence, are generated by a boot-strap method that replicates the two-stage sample design.

Poverty in Egypt: Modeling and Policy Simulations

Poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society, but they are limited by the bivariate nature of their informational content. Using the 1997 Egypt Integrated Household Survey (EIHS), this article estimates models of household consumption in the first stage and then predicts poverty rates corresponding to changes in potential policy variables. The key results of the study point to the important instrumental role of education, parental background, land redistribution, and access to health facilities in alleviating poverty in Egypt.

Rising Food Prices and Coping Strategies: Household-Level Evidence from Afghanistan

This paper investigates the impact of rising wheat prices -- during the 2007/08 global food crisis -- on food security in Afghanistan. Exploiting the temporal stratification of a unique nationally-representative household survey, the analysis finds evidence of large declines in real per capita food consumption and in food security (per capita calorie intake and household dietary diversity) corresponding to the price shocks. The data reveal smaller price elasticities with respect to calories than with respect to food consumption, suggesting that households trade off quality for quantity as they move toward staple foods and away from nutrient-rich foods such as meat and vegetables. In addition, there is increased demand in the face of price increases (Giffen good properties) for wheat products in urban areas. This study improves on country-level simulation studies by providing estimates of actual household wellbeing before and during the height of the global food crisis in one of the worlds poorest, most food-insecure countries.

Continuous and Robust Measures of the Overweight Epidemic: 1971-2000

This article considers alternate measures of the overweight epidemic that are more robust to measurement error, continuous in the body-mass index (BMI) at the overweight threshold, and sensitive to changes in the BMI distribution. The measures suggest that prevalence rates may understate the severity of the overweight problem. Since 1971, the prevalence of overweight has increased by 37%, while the distribution-sensitive measure has increased by 173%. Furthermore, although Hispanics have the highest prevalence of overweight, the distribution-sensitive measures reveal that overweight Hispanics exceed the overweight threshold by the smallest proportion (21%), whereas overweight non-Hispanic blacks exceed the threshold by 33%, on average.

Overweight and Poor? On the Relationship between Income and the Body Mass Index

Contrary to conventional wisdom, NHANES data indicate that the poor have never had a statistically significant higher prevalence of overweight status at any time in the last 35 years. Despite this empirical evidence, the view that the poor are less healthy in terms of excess accumulation of fat persists. This paper provides evidence that conventional wisdom is reflecting important differences in the relationship between income and the body mass index. The first finding is based on distribution-sensitive measures of overweight which indicates that the severity of overweight has been higher for the poor than the nonpoor throughout the last 35 years. The second finding is from a newly introduced estimator, unconditional quantile regression (UQR), which provides a measure of the income-gradient in BMI at different points on the unconditional BMI distribution. The UQR estimator indicates that the strongest relationship between income and BMI is observed at the tails of the distribution. There is a statistically significant negative income gradient in BMI at the obesity threshold and some evidence of a positive gradient at the underweight threshold. Both of these UQR estimates imply that for those at the tails of the BMI distribution, increases in income are correlated with healthier BMI values.

From Tragedy to Renaissance: Improving Agricultural Data for Better Policies

Abstract Agricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction, yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus. There are several reasons for this: (1) difficult-to-measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries; (2) agricultural data are collected with little coordination across sectors; and (3) poor analysis undermines the demand for high-quality data. This article argues that initiatives like the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics bode well for the future. Moving from Devarajan’s statistical tragedy’ to Kiregyera’s statistical ‘renaissance’ will take a continued long-term effort by individual countries and development partners.

Food Insecurity in Vulnerable Populations: Coping with Food Price Shocks in Afghanistan

Based on data from Afghanistan collected prior to and during the 2007-2008 food price crisis, this paper illustrates that caloric intake is an ineffectual indicator for monitoring the onset of food insecurity. Unconditional Quantile Regression estimates indicate that the most vulnerable of households, which cannot afford to make substantial cuts to calories, exhibit no decline in caloric intake in response to increasing wheat prices. In contrast, households with high-calorie diets experience large declines. The estimates also reveal declines in dietary diversity across the entire distribution of households. The most vulnerable households may be sacrificing diet quality to maintain calories, with the potential for serious and long-term health consequences.

Global Poverty Goals and Prices: How Purchasing Power Parity Matters

With the recent release of the 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) data from the International Comparison Program (ICP), analysts and institutions are confronted with the question of whether and how to use them for global poverty estimation. The previous round of PPP data from 2005 led to a large increase in the estimated number of poor in the world. The 2011 price data suggest that developing countries’ incomes in PPP-adjusted dollars are significantly higher than indicated by the 2005 PPP data. This has created the anticipation that the new PPP data will decrease significantly the count of poor people in the world. This paper presents evidence that if the global poverty line is updated with the 2011 PPP data based on the same set of national poverty lines that define the

Earnings, schooling, and economic reform : econometric evidence from Hungary (1986-2004)

1.25 line in 2005 PPPs, and if the 2011 PPP conversion factors are used without adjustments to selected countries, the 2011 poverty rate is within half a percentage point of the current global estimate based on 2005 PPPs. The analysis also indicates that the goal of ‘ending’ extreme poverty by 2030 continues to be an ambitious one.