POVERTY SIMULATION AND PRICE CHANGES

Spatial price dispersion varies because of climatic fluctuations, marketimperfections, economic growth or economic policies. These variations areoften neglected in poverty studies.In this paper, we propose a simple simulation formula to assess the effecton poverty of a change in the spatial mean or spatial variance of price indiceswithout having to model each household situation. This approach constitutes aconvenient first step of the analysis of the impact of change in pricedistributions before more sophisticated investigation of causality structures andhousehold heterogeneity.