DEPP working paper
This Working Paper is part of the Development Economics and Public Policy series
Poverty Persistence and Transitions in Uganda: A Combined Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis
David Lawson, Andy McKay and John Okidi
Abstract
Uganda's excellent record in reducing the national incidence of monetary poverty over the 1990s is widely known. Panel data though over this period shows that this net aggregate reduction was accompanied by substantial mobility into as well out of poverty. A majority of those who were poor in 1992 had escaped by 1999, but a substantial minority were left behind and many others fell into poverty over this period. Therefore, against the background of Uganda's impressive macroeconomic performance over this decade, there was a significant variation in individual experiences of poverty movements, and it is important to understand the factors, many of which are individual or local, that contributed to this.
This paper develops this understanding by combining qualitative and quantitative insights at the individual, household and community level. It builds strongly on earlier work by Okidi, with different authors, exploiting the available panel data sets for Uganda. The paper analyses panel data covering the 1992-1999 period in combination with available qualitative information, notably the results of the two assessments conducted as part of the Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Process (UPPAP), to gain insights on the factors associated with poverty transitions and persistence. The qualitative sources add substantially to the information available from the panel survey data alone, by helping to identify key issues to investigate using the survey data and by providing important additional insights not available from the survey data, including about processes and contextual issues.
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