SAGA Working Paper October 2003 Growth and Poverty Reduction in Uganda, 1992-1999: A Multidimensional Analysis of Changes in Living Standards

This paper examines Uganda’s progress on poverty reduction when poverty is measured in multiple dimensions. In particular, I consider poverty measures that are defined across household expenditures per capita or household assets, children’s health status, and in some cases, mother’s literacy. The comparisons are robust to the choice of poverty line, poverty measure, and sampling error. In general, I find that multidimensional poverty declined significantly in Uganda during the 1990s, although results for the latter half of the decade are more ambiguous. While there was clear progress in the dimension of expenditures and assets, improvement in children’s height-for-age z-scores is less certain for the 1995-2000 period. I also make poverty comparisons for individual regions and urban and rural areas in the country. Rather surprisingly, progress on multivariate poverty reduction is less clear in Central region and in urban areas. I am grateful to Sudharshan Canagarajah for suggesting the topic of this paper, and to Simon Appleton for providing me with the comparable household expenditure aggregates for the 1992 Integrated Household Survey and the 1999 National Household Survey. Research for this paper is supported by the SAGA project under cooperative agreement #HFM-A-00-01-00132-00 between USAID and Cornell and Clark-Atlanta Universities.