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Poor Places, Thriving People
Egypt, however, interprovincial inequality accounts for more than a fifth of total inequality. In Djibouti, where the rural-urban divide was insignificant, interdistrict inequality is about a sixth of overall inequality. In Morocco, the situation is very interesting. Although rural-urban disparities were quite important in Morocco, the household expenditure survey data from 1999 and 2001 revealed that interprovincial inequality was a very small part of overall inequality. And yet the wealth index of the Demographic and Health Survey makes out that a full 29 percent of overall economic inequality is accounted for by interprovincial disparities. This finding means that interprovincial disparities in ownership of assets such as housing, livestock, land, and consumer durables are important, but interprovincial disparities in household expenditure are not. Disparities that May Not Be as Spatial as They May Seem The bottom line is that socioeconomic disparities might not be as important in measured living standards as they are in politics. We have seen earlier that politics tends to “spatialize” issues. Therefore, it is all the more important for policy makers to perform some cold, objective analysis of the real role of location in determining people’s life-chances.
Low Economic Opportunity . . . Or Low Human Development? As we saw in table 3.7, Egypt’s interprovincial disparities account for around a fifth of total inequality. The lagging area is the Nile Valley south of Cairo, also known as Upper Egypt. Although Upper Egypt has only 40 percent of the country’s population, it has 60 percent of its poverty and 80 percent of its severe poverty. Here is a striking fact: demography explains 62 percent of the consumption gap between Upper and Lower Egypt (World Bank 2009b) (table 3.8). Much thought has gone into identifying which geographical handicaps have blocked Upper Egypt’s development: its distance from Cairo and major ports, a lack of transportation infrastructure, or a shortage of land and other productive natural resources. The fact is, however, that Upper Egyptian workers earn only 8 percent less on average than their Lower Egyptian counterparts and have only a slightly higher employment rate, so economic opportunity might not be the main factor holding them back. The problem is that when Upper Egyptian workers return home, they have to share their earnings with more nonworking family members who might be too young or too old, or excluded from the labor market by social constraints on women. In other words “demographic dependency,” the ratio of dependents to people of working age, is higher in Upper Egypt than in Lower Egypt. Unfavorable household