Welfare Dynamics With Synthetic Panels: The Case of the Arab World In Transition

Abstract

This paper studies welfare dynamics, especially changes associated with middle-class status in Arab countries. Absent panel data, we construct synthetic panels using repeated cross sections of household expenditure surveys and subjective wellbeing surveys conducted during the 2000s and early 2010s. Objective welfare dynamics indicate mixed trends. About half of the poor in the 2000s moved out of poverty by the end of the decade, but chronic poverty remained high; upward mobility was strong in Syria and Tunisia, but downward mobility was pronounced in Yemen and Egypt. The analysis with subjective wellbeing data suggests negative developments in most countries during the Arab Spring transitions and provides evidence on the eroding middle-class consensus in Arab countries before and after the Arab Spring. Low education achievement, informal worker status, and rural residency are positively associated with lower chances for upward mobility and greater chances for downward mobility for both types of welfare measures. JEL Codes: D31, I30, I31

Subjective Well-Being and Peaceful Uprisings

“…(3) countries, where poverty rates and rates of suffering are low, but the rates of struggling are significant. This result is consistent with the experience in many developed countries where the middle-class squeeze became a major factor in the popular movements which emerged after the global financial and economic crisis in 2008 (Dang and Ianchovichina, 2018). This finding is also consistent with the idea that well-being is a relative concept, i.e.…”

Data Gaps, Data Incomparability, and Data Imputation: A Review of Poverty Measurement Methods for Data‐scarce Environments

“…On the other hand, some empirical evidence suggests that poverty may not necessarily overlap with unhappiness or other subjective assessments in a number of countries (see, e.g. Banerjee and Duflo, 2007;Rojas, 2008;Graham, 2010;Dang and Ianchovichina, 2018). More specifically, some researchers even suggest that cross-country rankings based on self-reported happiness in the World Value Surveys can be rather sensitive to the assumption made to transform it from the unobserved latent and continuous variable into an observed discrete variable (Bond and Lang, 2014;Gibson, 2016).…”

“…Indeed, these synthetic panels have been increasingly employed in a variety of contexts. Recent applications and further validations include Nayar et al (2012) and Rama et al (2015) for South Asian countries, Ferreira et al (2012), Cruces et al (2015) and Vakis et al (2015) for Latin American countries, Martinez et al (2013) for the Philippines, Garbero (2014) for Vietnam, Bourguignon et al (2018) and Foster and Rothbaum (2015) for Mexico, Cancho et al (2015) for countries in Europe and Central Asia, Dang and Ianchovichina (2018) for countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, Dang and Dabalen (2018) and Dang et al (2017b) for countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Dang and Lanjouw (2017; for India, Vietnam and the United States. Researchers at international organizations including the UNDP, the Asian Development Bank and the OECD have also applied these methods for analysis of welfare mobility (UNDP, 2016;Jha et al, 2018;OECD, 2018); see also OECD (2015) for an application by the OECD to study labour transitions in richer countries.…”

Bienestar subjetivo y económico: análisis longitudinal para Ecuador

“…Además, su medición incorpora aspectos no incluidos en los indicadores objetivos, tales como la calidad de vida, calidad de servicios públicos, expectativas, satisfacción de necesidades, logro de metas, etc. (Dang e Ianchovichina, 2016;Diener, 2000). Asimismo, desde un punto de vista político, mantener en la población un sentimiento de satisfacción con la vida contribuye a la sostenibilidad de las democracias y de los procesos políticos (Graham y Pettinato, 2002;Inglehart, 2000).…”