Spatial Patterns and Geographic Determinants of Welfare and Poverty in Tunisia

Mohamed Ayadi () and Amara Mohamed ()

No 478, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: Previous poverty analysis in Tunisia concluded that the poor population is concentrated in interior areas, especially in the northwest and center west. Thus more information on the spatial dimension of welfare and poverty may be of interest for any poverty alleviation programs as poverty may be associated to geographic locations. However, the analysis of the spatial dimension cannot be limited to the addition of some variables to our econometric model. We have to consider the neighborhood effects and the heterogeneity of households’ behaviors in more disaggregated geographic units using specific tools of spatial and geographical analysis. First, we conduct an exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) based on a geographical information system (GIS), to visualize the “local” spatial structure of poverty. Second — to deal with spatial autocorrelations and unobserved spatial heterogeneity of the households’ behaviors — we use a spatial autoregressive model (SAR) and a geographical weighted regression model (GWR) respectively. Spatial and non-spatial models are compared according to their prediction performances. SAR and GWR spatial models are found superior to the traditional non-spatial regression model, and give a better approximation of the Tunisian poverty map.

Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2009-03, Revised 2009-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/478.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/478.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/478.pdf)
http://erf.org.eg/publications/spatial-patterns-ge ... are-poverty-tunisia/ (text/html)

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:erg:wpaper:478

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().