Local government spending and multidimensional poverty in Senegal: insight from the fuzzy approach

The majority of African countries, included Senegal, continue to face widespread poverty. The objective of poverty reduction is accompanied by a set of initiatives and programs that might be reflected in the government budget allocation. A crucial point is to explore, in a context of severely limited resources, how to optimize budget allocation between different sectors and therefore get higher impact without necessarily much financial resources. In an effort to inform this discussion, this paper examines the linkage between disaggregated government expenditures and poverty using the most recent poverty monitoring survey in Senegal. Unlike most previous studies, our analysis is based on fuzzy set theory in the aim to find a suitable, complete and reliable way of measuring poverty, to overcome the limitations of one-dimensional framework, and better assess the impact of prior government expenditures. High heterogeneity in poverty appears from the decomposition of the overall poverty by location and by household head’s characteristics. The results from the model elucidate that previous government spending in infrastructure and spending on social development and women entrepreneurship yielded some positive impacts on poverty. These results provide useful policy insights for helping to improve the effectiveness of expenditures in reducing poverty.