Quand la pauvreté affecte plus les villes, affecte-t-elle plus les femmes ?. Le cas de Madagascar

Based on the Madagascar priority surveys of 2001 and 2005, the study examines the feminization of the urbanization of poverty, and the relations witch prevail with the labour market. Firstly, in a context where the share of urban poverty increased more quickly than the urban population during the period 2001-2005, a first test suggests that, in the great urban centres, the female households would have become more touched relatively by poverty. Secondly, another test of the feminization of poverty, based on estimates of a spatial auto-regressive model, indicates that, all things being equal, for household?s heads, when the regional urbanization rate increases by 1 percent, the gap in the ratio of regional poverty [women-men] grows by 0.81 percentage point. Thirdly, the regional impact of the feminization of poverty seems to be inversely related to growth rates for women in the labour supply per capita, working hours per employee and labour productivity, and positively correlated to the relative growth rate per capita of female employment. In this context, the decline in the quality and efficiency of jobs, affecting more than proportionately the women, the faster growth of female urban unemployment, and the growing disparities by sex in the rate of global under-occupation reinforce a greater attention to labour market policies in order to promote urban employment for women.