Poverty Profile Tunisia is a good example of successful adjustment with a favorable impact on the incidence of poverty. The government's adjustment program, coupled with pro-poor policies have reduced income inequality and poverty: the number of poor was reduced from 11 percent of the population in 1985 to 7 percent in 1990. The estimated number of poor, however, is very sensitive to changes in the poverty line: if the poverty line was raised by 25 percent, the share of the population in poverty would increase from 7 percent to about 14 percent. Key characteristics of the poor are as follows. - Poverty remains primarily a rural phenomenon: about two-thirds of Tunisia's poor live in rural areas.
- There is a marked disparity in poverty among regions: the north-west, followed by the center-west have the highest incidence of poverty. These regions are characterized by hilly terrain and by their distance from the more dynamic economies of the eastern coastal cities.
- In both rural and urban areas, poor households tend to be above average in size, have a high dependency ratio, and tend not to be headed by young breadwinners.
- There is a strong association between lack of human capital and poverty in both rural and urban areas: two-thirds of the poor belong to households whose breadwinner has no formal education.
- In both rural and urban areas, most poor earn their living as wage earners, followed by self-employment in nonagricultural activities.
- The rural poor derive their incomes primarily from agricultural activities (own-farm activities and agricultural wage labor), but commonly also earn income outside agriculture. Many rural poor also own land and livestock, but their landholdings are small, rarely irrigated, and have low productivity.
Incentive and Regulatory Framework Tunisia's success in reducing poverty, even during structural adjustment of the mid-1980s, is the product of the government's long-standing commitment to social development. Features in the economy during the adjustment that helped keep poverty under control are: - While undertaking sustained fiscal adjustment, the government protected the public expenditures in social sectors most important to the welfare of the poor.
- The growth pattern, about 5 percent a year between 1985 and 1990, generated jobs at low wages and for unskilled and temporary workers in a few labor-intensive exports activities (textiles/tourism).
- Despite the fall in the real wage, disposable household income increased and income distribution improved.
Public Expenditures Tunisia's poor have also benefited from government programs in social sectors (education, health care, and basic infrastructure). Despite significant improvement in the living standards of the Tunisian population, including those of the poor, progress in social indicators has not been uniform across the country, and significant disparities remain between urban and rural areas. - In education, although access to primary education has improved for the poor, but at the same time the high selectivity of the school system tends to have a social bias: half of all children who begin school, drop out before completing basic education, and they are disproportionately from poorer families and girls in rural areas.
- Although almost all of the population, regardless of income, has access to basic health care, disparities remain between urban and rural areas: share of women receiving prenatal care is still 35 percent lower in rural areas than in urban areas, and infant mortality is higher in the country's poorest western region, in the south, and among lower-income groups.
- In basic infrastructure (potable water and electricity), access to services is still much greater in urban areas despite impressive expansion in rural access: more than 90 percent of the urban population and about 70-80 percent of the urban poor have access to piped water and electricity, while in rural areas, about 65 percent of the population and about 50 percent of the poor have access to potable water and electricity.
Improved cost recovery, better targeting, and efficiency-enhancing measures will all be necessary to improve the quality and quantity of basic social services in the face of scarce public resources. Efforts should concentrate on: (i) maintaining reasonable quality and reducing high drop-out rates in basic education; (ii) maintaining the quality and improving the efficiency of resource use in basic health services; and (iii) expanding infrastructure services to regions in which poverty is more acute. Safety Net Tunisian authorities have attempted to alleviate poverty through three types of safety net programs: (i) food subsidies targeted to the poor through self-selection mechanisms using quality differentiation; (ii) direct transfers in kind and in cash targeted to the needy (elderly, handicapped, schoolchildren, and needy families); and (iii) public works programs that provide short-term jobs for unskilled workers, in both urban and rural areas, through self-targeted mechanisms, such as setting wages below the minimum wage and locating the work sites in predominantly poor areas. Overall, these programs have helped to alleviate poverty and have been an efficient vehicle for transferring income to the poor. But the targeting of these programs, particularly the direct cash transfers to needy families, could be improved. These cash transfers suffer from the difficulties that typically arise using means tests and specific eligibility criteria. Thus, a clear understanding of the economic and social characteristics of the poor is needed to develop adequate household socioeconomic indicators for identifying poverty groups. Poverty Strategy Despite admirable progress in reducing poverty and improving Tunisian living standards, increased international competition and closer integration with Europe pose new and particularly demanding challenges for human resource development and labor force flexibility. The policies and institutions responsible for social achievements need no drastic change, but they need to continue to adapt to a changing economic environment. Although, the government's poverty reduction strategy is based on a sound economic rational, a more efficient use of existing resources is needed. To maintain past achievements and continue efforts to improve the living standards of the poor, the following elements are needed: - maintaining incentive-neutral policies to promote broadly based growth, to sustain the growth in employment and in per capita income, and to ensure that the benefits of growth are distributed across all income groups;
- providing income-earning opportunities, particularly in rural areas and in activities outside agriculture;
- reinforcing human capital development to ensure that the poor can acquire the education and skills to take advantage of job opportunities and can keep pace with economic and structural changes and benefit from the new skilled jobs, and;
- improving the targeting of existing safety net programs for those who could not take advantage of income earning opportunities.
Statistical System Although Tunisia's National Household Consumption Surveys provide high-quality profiles of consumption and expenditure patterns on a regular basis (every five years), this information has not been used to regularly monitor social programs or inform social policy. Moreover, better data are needed on sources of income and on access to social services and their effectiveness. To improve the social data and to make better-informed policy choices, Tunisia's government has launched a Living Standards Measurement Survey in 1995 to upgrade the Household Consumption Survey. The results should be analyzed to further the understanding of poverty in Tunisia and to improve the focus of the poverty alleviation strategy. To support and coordinate efforts in monitoring poverty, analyzing welfare changes, and making better-informed policy choices, the value and importance of these data need to be illustrated to the government. Back to Poverty Assessment Summaries — Middle East and North Africa |
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