Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda

Spatial poverty comparisons are investigated in three Africancountries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. Thework is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literaturein that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to the choiceof multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In addition,the study seeks to ensure that the comparisons are robust toaggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables. In contrastto earlier work, the methodology applies equally well to whatcan be defined as "union," "intersection," and "intermediate"approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being.Furthermore, unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature,this work computes the sampling distributions of the povertyestimators to perform statistical tests of the difference inpoverty measures. The methods are applied to two measures ofwell-being, the log of household expenditures per capita andchildren’s height-for-age z scores, using data from the1988 Ghana Living Standards Study survey, the 1993 NationalHousehold Survey in Madagascar, and the 1999 National HouseholdSurvey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons are at oddswith univariate comparisons in several interesting ways. Mostimportant, it cannot always be concluded that poverty is lowerin urban areas in one region compared with that in rural areasin another, even though univariate comparisons based on householdexpenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion.     

Expenditure Incidence in Africa: Microeconomic Evidence

In this paper, we examine the progressivity of social sector expenditures in eight sub‐Saharan African countries. We employ dominance tests, complemented by extended Gini/concentration coefficients, to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. We find that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to be most progressive and university education is least progressive. The benefits associated with hospital care are also less progressive than other health facilities. Our results also show that, while concentration curves are a useful way to summarise information on the distributional benefits of government expenditures, statistical testing of differences in curves is important.     

Fiscal Incidence in Ghana

We use methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute to assess the effects of government taxation, social spending and indirect subsidies on poverty and inequality in Ghana. We also simulate several policy reforms to assess their distributional consequences. Results show that, although the country has some very progressive taxes and well‐targeted expenditures, the extent of fiscal redistribution is small, but about what one would expect given Ghana's income level and relatively low initial inequality. Results for poverty reduction are less encouraging: were it not for the in‐kind benefits from health and education spending, the overall effect of government spending and taxation would actually increase poverty in Ghana. Eliminating energy subsidies and at the same time reallocating part of the savings to well‐targeted transfer programs could lower the fiscal deficit while reducing inequality and protecting the poor.