Modeling determinants of poverty in Mauritania

This paper presents a brief descriptive summary of poverty in Mauritania as revealed by household survey data for 1990, and then uses regression analysis to study the determinants of living standards and hence poverty. The latter is conducted at the level of broadly defined socioeconomic groups, using an econometric technique which also models the selection of households into socioeconomic groups. Household characteristics are used as explanatory variables, including demographic, education, and sector-specific variables. By controlling for many factors, multivariate analysis enables a clearer understanding of the nature and determinants of poverty than can be obtained from examination of summary poverty indices. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd