Poverty in Egypt: Modeling and Policy Simulations

Poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society, but they are limited by the bivariate nature of their informational content. Using the 1997 Egypt Integrated Household Survey (EIHS), this article estimates models of household consumption in the first stage and then predicts poverty rates corresponding to changes in potential policy variables. The key results of the study point to the important instrumental role of education, parental background, land redistribution, and access to health facilities in alleviating poverty in Egypt.