Impacts of COVID-19 on Household Welfare in Tunisia
COVID-19 is likely to have a large impact on the welfare of Tunisian households. First, some individuals might be more vulnerable to contracting the disease because their living conditions or jobs make them more susceptible to meeting others or pra...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/529381608228318922/Impacts-of-COVID-19-on-Household-Welfare-in-Tunisia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34980 |
| Summary: | COVID-19 is likely to have a large
impact on the welfare of Tunisian households. First, some
individuals might be more vulnerable to contracting the
disease because their living conditions or jobs make them
more susceptible to meeting others or practicing social
distancing. Lack of adequate access to health insurance,
overcrowded living conditions, and low access to water at
home are reasons that make the Tunisian poor more
susceptible to getting infected or not being able to seek
health care in the event that they contract COVID-19. In
addition, the elderly in the poorest households could be
more susceptible to COVID-19 due to higher prevalence of
intergenerational households among the poor. Second, many
sectors of the labor market have experienced an economic
slowdown, and those employed in these sectors are likely to
experience disproportionate effects. Combining the labor
shock and price shock simultaneously, the simulations in
this paper show an increase in poverty of 7.3 percentage
points under a more optimistic scenario and 11.9 percentage
points under the pessimistic scenario, and individuals in
sectors such as tourism and construction are expected to
fall into poverty due to COVID-19. The paper estimates that
the government’s compensatory measures targeted toward the
hardest hit are expected to mitigate the increase in
poverty. Specifically, the increase in poverty will be 6.5
percentage points under the optimistic scenario if
mitigation measures are in place vis-à-vis in their absence,
when the increase in poverty is 7.3 percentage points. |
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