The Impact of AIDS Mortality on the Distribution of Income in Côte d'Ivoire

We build a micro-simulation model able to simulate over a 15 years' period the impact of AIDS on the distribution of income in Côte d'Ivoire. We focus on the labour supply effects of AIDS-induced mortality. We find that although the size of the economy in terms of total household income is reduced by about 6% after 15 years, average household income per capita, household income inequality and poverty remain almost unchanged. In contrast to an often heard argument, the population dependency ratio is not much modified by the AIDS epidemic. These conclusions do not seem to depend on the degree of heterogeneity and clustering of HIV/AIDS infections over the population. Copyright 2008 The author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.