Croissance et pauvreté multidimensionnelle dans les SUDS

This project entitled " Growth and Multidimensional Poverty in the South " refers to the theme 2.2. (Development in question: concepts, challenges and practices), more precisely to the first sub-theme 2.1.1. (the study of the causes of poverty in the development process of the Mediterranean countries) and indirectly to the sub-theme 2.3.3. (which concerns public sectorial policies) of the call for the ANR projects " Les Suds aujourd'hui". The main goal of this research was to study the impact of economic growth on monetary and non monetary poverty in order to check whether growth has been biased in favour of the poor in the following six Mediterranean countries: Egypt, Israël, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. The originality of this research lies in the extension of the concept of well-being traditionally used in studies of poverty and pro-poor growth. Despite the fact that the multidimensional nature of poverty is now well recognized, poverty studies in these countries are still dominated by the income based approach and attempts at taking a multidimensional approach to poverty measurement are rather scarce. At the end of the 1980s, many of these countries were confronted with high budgetary deficits forcing them to introduce stabilisation and structural adjustment programs. Structural economic reforms have however been implemented with varying intensity among the five countries. Such discrepancies may have led to different performances in terms of standard of living and poverty reduction, depending on the development strategy adopted. However, simple comparisons of monetary poverty levels do not make it possible to capture the impact of such structural reforms on the well-being of the population in each country. The studies undertaken for this project used several multidimensional measurement approaches that have been recently proposed in the literature (fuzzy sets, axiomatic approaches and tools of stochastic dominance, etc) and applied them to micro data from households' budget surveys, when available, but mainly from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Measures that included non monetary indicators (among them access to durable goods, housing conditions, basic services, education, etc) showed that there was a poverty bias in rural as well as in regional areas and seemed to indicate contrasting trends over time, depending on the country examined. At the same time, these studies made it possible to identify the dimensions recording the highest level of deprivation. In parallel, the investigation of multidimensional poverty over time and across countries modifies somehow the ranking of countries based on the common human development indices and underlines differences between countries, that might mirror the impact of past economic and social development policies. Moreover, methodological extensions have been suggested in order to address issues such as that of the link between the different dimensions of poverty. Lastly, to better analyze the evolution of poverty over time, we attempted to check whether variations in poverty were mainly due to growth or/and to redistribution effects. At this stage, the originality of the research lies in addressing the pro-poorness of growth within the framework of multidimensional poverty. Studies carried out made primarily use of the growth incidence curves and their extension to non monetary dimensions suggested by Grosse, Harttgen and Klasen (2008). While in some studies a monetary definition of poverty was used to address the issue of pro-poor growth, we were able in some cases to take a non monetary approach (including well-being indices, education, etc). The results obtained by areas of residence and by regions show contrasting evolutions in comparison with those assessed at the national level and reveal high disparities in the distribution of the benefits of economic growth. Finally, some methodological extensions of the pro-poor growth concept, using in particular the tools of sequential stochastic dominance, seemed to offer a better grasp of the monetary and non monetary facets of poverty for pro-poorness checks. This research seems therefore to have enriched the analysis of the variation in the achievements observed in the main dimensions covered by the MDG and should thus help better designing and monitoring social spending programs that contribute to poverty reduction.