Key Messages

CHAPTER 6

Tunisia: Poorest Households Are the Most Vulnerable

Deeksha Kokas, Abdelrahmen El Lahga, and Gladys Lopez-Acevedo

Key Messages

• COVID-19 is going to exacerbate Tunisia’s existing development challenges by reversing the trend of poverty reduction in recent years—with the risk of an increasing number of people falling below the poverty line and an increasing degree of poverty severity for the already poor.

• Our study’s results show that—combining labor and price shocks simultaneously—poverty is projected to increase by 7.3 percentage points under the optimistic scenario and by 11.9 points under the pessimistic one, implying a more than 50 percent increase in poverty in the first scenario and almost a doubling of the poverty rate in the second.

• Households with per capita consumption in the poorest 20 percent of the population—which are concentrated in Tunisia’s Center

West and South East regions—would be hardest hit. As for the most vulnerable individuals, they are likely to be women, live in large households, lack access to health care, and are employed without contracts.

• The government’s compensatory measures targeting the hardest hit are expected to mitigate some of these losses. Specifically, the increase in poverty would be 6.5 percentage points under the optimistic scenario if mitigation measures are in place versus 7.3 percentage points in their absence.