Dynamics of Poverty and Wellbeing in Ethiopia An Introduction to a Special Issue of the Ethiopian Journal of Economics

Abstract

Understanding change is critical to policy formulation. Who benefits, who
loses from change, and what causes change are core policy questions. Panel
data are central to understanding change, and this special issue of the journal
is devoted to five papers examining change in wellbeing as measured by two
waves of data from the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (ESS). The papers
cover changes in consumption poverty, multi-dimensional poverty, food
security, malnutrition in the form of wasting and underweight status, and
smoothing patterns of nonfarm enterprise activities. The ESS data is freely
available for download and immediate use. While the papers in this issue draw
from the first two waves of data (2011-12 and 2013-14), the third wave of the
ESS (2015-16) is now also publicly available. The ESS is a collaborative effort
of the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia and the World Bank’s Living
Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys of Agriculture program.