Factors affecting poverty dynamics and persistence in Uganda.
Abstract
Despite the excellent progress made by Uganda in reducing poverty since 1992, there have also been substantial movements both into and out of poverty, and a significant minority of households have been persistently poor. Two different panel data sets over the 1990s establish the significant extent of persistent or chronic poverty, and show that there is a strong associated between poverty persistence and the depth of poverty - in other words many of the persistent poor are also among the poorest of the poor at any point in time. Clearly these households have failed to benefit from Uganda's impressive macroeconomic development over this period. In addition, the most recent estimates for poverty dynamics suggest that up to one third of households moved out of poverty, and a tenth moved into poverty, over an eight year period to 1999.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews approaches which have been taken to modelling the factors associated with chronic and transient poverty, poverty transitions and so on to date. Section 3 describes the information sources used, including describing the survey data and the steps involved to establish as reliable a panel data set as possible. This is followed in section 4 by a descriptive analysis of the patterns of poverty discusses according to several different characteristics of the households concerned, and forms the basis for the more detail multivariate econometric analysis in section 5. Section 6 concludes.
Citation
Factors affecting poverty dynamics and persistence in Uganda, presented at Staying Poor: Chronic Poverty and Development Policy, Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, 7-9 April 2003. Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), Manchester, UK, 24 pp.
Links