The lucky few amidst economic decline: distributional change in Cote d'Ivoire as seen through panel data sets, 1985-88

Christiaan Grootaert and Ravi Kanbur

No 1113, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Cote d'Ivoire's economy declined drastically in the second half of the 1980s. The incidence of poverty climbed from 30 percent in 1985 to 35 percent in 1987, and jumped to 46 percent in 1988. But how widespread was the collapse in living standards Did a lucky few escape the decline Using panels of data from the Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (for 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88) allowed the authors to track the level of living for the same households over successive years. These panels had not yet been used to examine the dynamics of poverty in the second half of the 1980s. They find that two-period poverty was generally less than poverty measured from single-period snapshots. Surprisingly, a significant number of the poorest of the poor improve their status over the two years of the panel, even though there was a downturn in the average fortunes of the poor. The authors find that the lucky few are not so few. They were wide-spread regionally - though in some socioeconomic groupings, the poor had a greater chance to escape poverty amidst the general decline in living standards. Finer investigation of the characteristics of these groupings is hampered somewhat by the small sample sizes of the panels.

Keywords: Poverty Impact Evaluation; Poverty Monitoring & Analysis; International Trade and Trade Rules; Inequality; Poverty Assessment; Poverty Diagnostics; Poverty Lines; Small Area Estimation Poverty Mapping; Crime and Society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993-03-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/370721468771869814/pdf/multi0page.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:wbk:wbrwps:1113

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().