Rental Regulation and its Consequences on Measures of Well-Being in the Arab Republic of Egypt
The paper delves into the implications of a failure to account for rental regulation in the measurement of households' welfare, poverty, and inequality when using household surveys. Exploiting previously unavailable data for the Egyptian case,...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/224491500557651807/Rental-regulation-and-its-consequences-on-measures-of-well-being-in-the-Arab-Republic-of-Egypt http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27959 |
| Summary: | The paper delves into the implications
of a failure to account for rental regulation in the
measurement of households' welfare, poverty, and
inequality when using household surveys. Exploiting
previously unavailable data for the Egyptian case, the paper
illustrates the long-lasting distortions in the rental
market that the 1977 rental law has created. The paper finds
evidence that earlier studies may have substantially
underestimated households’ welfare in urban areas and
overestimated urban poverty. National poverty rates show
smaller corrections, as poverty is mainly a rural phenomenon
in the Arab Republic of Egypt. An appropriate measure of
welfare also led to downward corrections in inequality in
urban Egypt, while increasing the inequality across regions.
These effects counterbalance each other and nationwide
inequality estimates are affected only slightly. |
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