Sami Bibi

Measuring Poverty in a Multidimensional Perspective: a Review of Literature

Recent pioneer papers of Sen (1981, 1985, 1992) have emphasized that poverty is a multidimensional issue. Hence, it should be seen in relation to the lack of important basic needs or basic capabilities. This recommendation has motivated many researchers to focus on the way multidimensional aspect of poverty should be measured and aggregated. This survey synthesizes the contribution of the main approaches to measuring poverty in its various dimensions to better understand the theoretical framework and the limitations of each. This should help one choose which approach to adopt based on the circumstances and the constraints of the study to be conducted.

When is Economic Growth Pro-Poor? Evidence from Tunisia

Many empirical studies have shown that economic growth generally leads to a drop in poverty. These studies have also pointed out that a given growth rate is compatible with a large range of outcomes in terms of poverty reduction. This means that growth is more pro-poor in certain cases than in others. Using complete and partial poverty orderings, this paper suggests a measure which captures the extent to which economic growth is pro-poor. This measure decomposes poverty changes into two components: the relative variation in the average income of the poor and the relative variation in the overall inequality within the poor. Evidence from Tunisia shows that economic growth was to a large extent pro-poor during the last two decades.

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.

Assessing absolute and relative pro-poor growth, with an application to selected African countries

This paper proposes a multidimensional procedure for jointly assessing the absolute and relative pro-poorness of growth. It is also a procedure for testing whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative views of poverty. Besides being robust to whether pro-poor judgements should be absolute or relative, the procedure is also robust to choosing over a class of weights to aggregate the impact of growth on the poor as well as over ranges of absolute and relative poverty lines. The test is applied to distributional changes in five middle- and four lower-income African countries, countries that have witnessed different impacts of growth in the last two decades.

On the Impact of Better Targeted Transfers on Poverty in Tunisia

This paper describes the effects of general food subsidies on poverty in Tunisia, as revealed by household survey data for 1990. The analysis indicates that the poorest certainly take advantage of this system, but at the price of considerable leakages to non-poor people and at a sizeable economic efficiency loss resulting from relative price distortions. Further, non-parametric estimations suggest that there are no commodities predominantly consumed by the poor. This implies that targeting by commodities is not an effective way to fight against poverty and so, it is unlikely that restructuring the current scheme would improve significantly the living standards of the less well-off members of society. We then investigate the impact on poverty of a more targeted transfer scheme, based on proxy means-tests, using an appropriate econometric technique to model it. Simulations show that this design would be more effective in reducing poverty than the use of general food subsidies. Finally, dominance tests show that this design would first-order-dominate food subsidies scheme within a range of poverty lines including all those estimated and generally used for Tunisia.

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.