Transient seasonal and chronic poverty of peasants: evidence from Rwanda
Using panel data from Rwanda, we estimate seasonal transient and chronic poverty indices, for different poverty line, poverty indicators, equivalence scale, and with and without the corrections for price variability and for the sampling scheme. We also estimate sampling standard errors for the poverty indices. The worse poverty crises occur after the dry season at the end of the year. Most of the severity of poverty comes from the seasonal transient component of annual poverty, while the seasonal component of the incidence of poverty is much smaller. Thus, the actual differences of the severity of poverty either between developing and industrial countries or between rural and urban areas in LDCs, may be much worse than what is shown by usual chronic annual poverty measures or by measures of seasonal incidence of poverty. The importance of the transient component suggests a need for income stabilisation policy. However, the contribution of the global transient seasonal poverty is important for household clustered around the poverty line but low for the poorest part of the chronically poor. Thus, policies fighting seasonal transient poverty are likely to concern the moderately poor rather than the very poor, as compared with policies against chronic poverty, which affect the very poor. The probability transition analysis across seasonal living standard distributions shows that mobility across quintiles is always very strong. The poverty crisis in the last season is more the result of many peasants falling into poverty than a decrease in the flow out of poverty. A safety net policy aimed at the poor and the non-poor at this period would then be appropriate. We estimate equations of quantiles for household chronic and transient seasonal poverty. The agricultural choices of peasants are found to affect differently the two components of annual poverty that could therefore be addressed by a combination of policies specific to each component.
Year of publication: |
1997-04-01
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Authors: | Muller, Christophe |
Institutions: | Department of Economics, Oxford University |
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