Urban-Rural Poverty Comparisons in Tunisia: a Robust Statistical Approach.

Poverty analysis in Tunisia so far depends heavily upon the choice of poverty lines. In this paper we propose to adopt an approach based on the determination of regional basic needs in order to estimte the differential between urban and rural lines. In order to get stable results we also propose to adopt a robust statistical approach to estimation and testing. This will then enable us to analyze poverty in Tunisia in a robust manner and find that poverty is actually a rural phenomenon.