Anti-Poverty Transfers and Spatial Prices in Tunisia

Christophe Muller

Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, CREDIT

Abstract: In this paper, we study the role of price correction in estimating the impact of price subsidies and anti-poverty cash transfer schemes on poverty in Tunisia. Three types of price corrections are considered: (a) no corrections; (b) living standards deflated by spatial Laspeyres price indices; (c) living standards deflated by true price indices that are estimated from a quadratic almost ideal demand system. Distinguishing these corrections and using data from Tunisia, we study the effects of the price deflation and the demand system estimation on poverty and budget leakage estimates. These effects can intervene at two stages of the estimation: (1) the calculation of the transfer levels for each household from predicted living standards, and (2) the estimation of the post-transfer poverty or budget leakage statistics. Our results show that price correction, whatever its form, may have only limited role for the assessment of anti-poverty policy in Tunisia. Correcting or not for spatial price differences, or for consumption substitution does not modify the ranking of the studied transfer policies. This is at odd with other findings in the empirical literature that price differences may be important for poverty monitoring.

Keywords: Poverty; Targeting; Transfers, Spatial Prices. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/credit/documents/papers/08-13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notcre:08/13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, CREDIT School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hilary Hughes ().