WEIGHTING DIMENSIONS OF POVERTY BASED ON PEOPLES PRIORITIES: Constructing a Composite Poverty Index for the Maldives

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where bilateral country pairs do not actually trade. We depart from the institutions and infrastructure literature in this respect, using Heckman selection model-based gravity estimators of trade flows. We also depart from this literature by mixing principal components (to condense our institutional and infrastructure measures) with a focus on deviations from expected values for given income cohorts to control for multicollinearity. Infrastructure, and institutional quality, are significant determinants not only of export levels, but also of the likelihood exports will take place at all. Our results support the notion that export performance, and the propensity to take part in the trading system at all, depends on institutional quality and access to well developed transport and communications infrastructure. Indeed, this dependence is far more important, empirically, than variations in tariffs in explaining sample variations in North-South trade. This implies that policy emphasis on developing country market access, instead of support for trade facilitation, may be misplaced.poverty measures, living standard dimensions, aggregation, composite index, Maldives

VULNERABILITY AND POVERTY DYNAMICS IN THE MALDIVES

Despite rapid economic and social development of the Maldives, the vulnerability of the island population in terms of poverty remains high. Using household panel data for the period 1997/98 Ð 2004 we show that, although the majority of the poor manages to escape from poverty, a substantial part of the non-poor falls back into poverty at the same time. Using Logit regression analysis, the most influential determinants of escaping household poverty are shown to be: the level of education, participation in community activities, and the proportion of adults employed. Factors that have the largest impact on impeding a poverty escape are: the proportion of household members not working due to bad health, living in the North, and the proportion of female household members. The former two factors, in addition to household size, are also most influential on the odds of falling into poverty. Working in tourism, or the public sector, and taking out a loan to invest are important factors that prevent households from falling into poverty. Policy implications of these results are not only relevant at government level but also at household level. The government may consider paying more attention to the development of the two Northern regions, improve access to good quality education and health care, and further develop (private sector) tourism across the country. Household coping strategies involve investing in education, entering the labour market (especially in tourism and the public sector) and family planning.vulnerability, income poverty dynamics, Maldives, Logit regression, probability of escaping from or falling into poverty

Changes in Poverty and Income Inequality in Pakistan during the 1970s

According to Paul Streeten [101, the relationship between poverty eradication and reducing income inequalities is still an unsettled question. He mentions empirical studies of eleven countries. In ten of these countries, poverty and inequality move in the same direction, both increasing (Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia) or both declining (Korea, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Yugoslavia, China and Israel). The only exception is perhaps Kuwait, where poverty (of Kuwaiti citizens, but not of the large group of immigrant workers) has been reduced, while inequality has increased (explanation: oil wealth)

Consumption and Trade of Wheat and Flour in Pakistan - The Role of Public and Private Sectors

This article, the second of two articles In this Review on the operation of the wheat market in Pakistan,- describes the various sources from which consumers in the Punjab, Sind and the NWFP obtain wheat and flour. There appear to be considerable differences in the patterns of wheat provisioning, if consumers are distinguished by province, rural and urban areas and household income. Further, an evaluation is made of the performance of private traders in wheat- and flour-markets. These findings are then used to examine whether the position of self-sufficiency in wheat, which the country has recently achieved, provides arguments for revising the wheat-market policies adopted during a period when the situation was much less favourable

Growth, Employment and Education: An Application of Multicriteria Analysis to Pakistan

Development planning is a multicriteria problem. Apart from economic goals (like economic growth, income distribution, employment, price stability, balance of payments, etc.) a set of basic human needs (like food, health , housing, clothing, education, etc.) has to be fulfilled within a limited time horizon. Of course, not all targets of economic policy can reach desirable levels within a plan period given scarce resources and trade-offs between goals and basic needs. Priorities have to be formulated and goals and needs have to be weighted against another. Multicriteria analysis can contribute to this weighing process by circumscribing feasible areas and by quantifying above mentioned trade-offs. The purpose of this paper is to present an illustration of multicriteria analysis in which at least two goals of economic policy (growth and employment) and one basic human need (education) are incorporated. The model is applied to Pakistan due to data access

Poverty Dynamics: the case of the Maldives

Poverty dynamics research leads to a better understanding of poverty than point-in-time studies. We have executed a comprehensive longitudinal poverty study based on 3 large-scale household surveys carried out on all 200 inhabited islands in the Maldives. The first wave was conducted in 1997 with follow-ups in 2004 and 2005. We have followed more than 1,000 of the same households over time to get insight in poverty dynamics and in the characteristics of households that managed to escape from poverty and of households that fell back to poverty. This thesis presents the results and introduces some conceptual and methodological innovations, such as a new poverty indicator, the Multidimensional Poverty Index with 12 dimensions: income, health, education, employment, housing, transport, electricity, communication, food security, environmental security, drinking water, and consumer goods. Policy implications of our results are not only relevant at government level but also at household level. Poverty reduction strategies of the government should be designed not just to lift the poor out of poverty, but also to prevent the non-poor from falling into poverty. In the Maldives case, the government may consider paying more attention to the North, further stimulating access to good quality education and health care, and further stimulating the development of (private sector) tourism across the country. As for poverty reduction strategies of the households themselves, our results point to more education, remittances, taking a loan to invest, and increasing the household labour force participation rate, especially in the public sector and in the tourism sector