Rim Chatti

Trade Liberalization and the Dynamic of Poverty in Tunisia: A Layered Microsimulation Analysis

The effects of trade liberalization on poverty in Tunisia are examined, using a layered dynamic CGE-microsimulation approach. A dynamic CGE model endogenously generates the evolution of prices and, for each household group, income paths under protection and freer trade assumptions. These results are then used to assess the equivalent income of each household, using a sample from 1995 household survey, and so the effects of the simulated changes on poverty. Dominance tests are also used to avoid the arbitrariness of choosing a poverty line and a poverty measure. Simulation results show that although trade openness slowdowns the downward trend of poverty in the short and medium-run, it enhances poverty reduction in the long-run.

A CGE Assessment of FTA Between Tunisia and the EU under Oligopolistic Market Structures

In this paper, the impact of removing all Tunisian tariffs on imports from the EU, while maintaining protection on imports from the rest of the world, is evaluated using computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. Both competitive and Cournot oligopolistic commodities market structures with and without barriers to entry and exit are considered. It is found that a free trade agreement (FTA) improves welfare in all cases, with maximum gains under oligopoly and free entry and exit. At the sectoral level, the FTA benefits different industries at the expense of agriculture and services, which are relatively intensive in primary factors of production.

Taxation policy and gender employment in the Middle East and North Africa Region: A comparative analysis of Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia

Empirical evidence suggests that women are more vulnerable to chronic poverty and gender inequality is likely to condition the impacts of policies on the rest of the economy and consequently on poverty itself. While gender-responsive budgeting has made significant headway into economic policy, taxation has lagged behind. Because tax policy is the most economically direct way by which governments can influence individual behavior, requests have been made for gender-responsive tax policy that promote gender equality. This study applied to Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia aims to contribute to this debate by assessing the induced gender employment bias of current taxation policies in these countries. It explores the pattern of male and female employment and discusses the indirect tax distortions across sectors within each country and between countries. The possible impact of the indirect tax distortion on male and female employment is quantitatively assessed using a gender-focused computable general equilibrium model. The analysis reveals that indirect taxes, in particular import duties, are biased for female employment in Algeria and Egypt, but not in Morocco and Tunisia. Female labor–intensive industries in Algeria and Egypt are highly protected in the benchmark and are not competitive internationally so that removing protection would increase competition with cheaper import substitutes and cause the sector to contract and lay off workers. In contrast, the same female labor–intensive industries are less protected in Morocco and Tunisia. Hence, removal of indirect taxes in these countries would result in quasi-neutral effects between male and female salary and wage earnings. The taxation policies in the Middle East and North Africa region have changed over the last decade and may undergo significant changes in the coming years. In light of this unpredictability, an assessment of the tax-related relative price bias on men and women constitutes a crucial step toward providing adequate guidance to planners, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

Gender Poverty in Tunisia: Is there A Feminization Issue?

The paper investigates the association between gender and poverty in Tunisia based upon an empirical analysis of 1990 and 2000 household surveys. It also tests whether or not there is a widespread feminization of poverty. To achieve these goals, the paper suggests a theoretically sound method to compute expenditure-based incidence of poverty and tests for differences in the headcount ratio between female- and male-headed households for a given period and whether or not this difference is increasing over time. Stochastic dominance tests are also performed to avoid arbitrary choices of poverty lines and indices. The results suggest that although female-headed households are subject to unequal treatment in the labor market, they are not poorer than their male counterparts, as they live with more active persons. However, as we increase the poverty line, the poverty difference between female- and male-headed households rises to the detriment of female-headed households and becomes statistically significant. However, what is more disquieting is that this difference increases over time due to the fall in both the level of and the returns to female labor endowment.

Public Spending, Pro-Poor Growth and Poverty Reduction in Tunisia: A Multilevel Analysis

One of the main goals of this study is to assess to what extent public spending contribute to enhance economic growth and poverty reduction. For this purpose, multilevel analysis approaches are followed to capture the likely effects of some public expenditure on growth, inequality, and poverty. One of the most important results of this study is that policies aimed at enhancing the purchase power of the poor are more effective in reducing poverty than policies aimed to improve human capital in the short run. Yet, in the long run, the second route enables to push up economic growth and to boost poverty reduction. These results give evidence that there are some trade-offs between short and long run. Thus, policies like conditional cash transfers are needed in the short run to smooth the negative impact of the policy changes that enhance economic growth and poverty reduction in the long run.

A Note on the Contribution of Sectoral Natural Population Growth to the Aggregate Poverty Change: Evidence from Bangladesh, Mongolia and Nicaragua

This note extends the Ravallion and Huppi (1991) aggregate poverty change decomposition, to account for the distinct contribution of migration and differential natural population growth between sectors to the aggregate poverty change. We apply our decomposition to three LDCs. We find that accounting for sectoral difference in natural population growth has a considerable impact on national poverty change.

A Note on the Contribution of Natural Population Growth and Migration to the Aggregate Poverty Change

This note extends the Ravallion and Huppi (1991) aggregate poverty change decomposition. It splits up the contribution of population share variation to overall poverty change into two distinct components: the effect of population shift between sectors is indeed isolated from the difference of natural sectoral population growth effect. Such decomposition is important for countries where the contribution of the inter-sectoral effect to total poverty change is high.