The lucky few amidst economic decline : distributional change in Cote d'Ivoire as seen through panel data sets, 1985-88

Cote d'Ivoire's economy declined drastically in the second half of the 1980s. The incidence of poverty climbed from 30 percent in 1985 to 35 percent in 1987, and jumped to 46 percent in 1988. But how widespread was the collapse in living standards? Did a lucky few escape the decline? Using panels of data from the Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (for 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88) allowed the authors to track the level of living for the same households over successive years. These panels had not yet been used to examine the dynamics of poverty in the second half of the 1980s. They find that two-period poverty was generally less than poverty measured from single-period snapshots. Surprisingly, a significant number of the poorest of the poor improve their status over the two years of the panel, even though there was a downturn in the average fortunes of the poor. The authors find that the lucky few are not so few. They were wide-spread regionally - though in some socioeconomic groupings, the poor had a greater chance to escape poverty amidst the general decline in living standards. Finer investigation of the characteristics of these groupings is hampered somewhat by the small sample sizes of the panels.