However, the price of nontradable staple food prices did decline. Moreover, the fact that the imputed value of home consumption likely fell in real terms must be factored into the analysis. When it is, and when account is taken of the fact that real cocoa prices did not increase substantially, there is reason to think that in the short run following the devaluation, poverty would have increased, or at least failed to decrease, among a substantial segment of the rural population.

# Household survey results

Two household expenditure surveys are available that allow us to trace the short-run impact of the devaluation on poverty. The pre-devaluation survey was carried out between June and November, 1993, except Abidjan, which was carried out in March-April 1992. A total of 9600 households were surveyed. The post-devaluation survey, with a much smaller sample of 1000 households, was carried out in April-May 1995. With several exceptions, we maintained the INS data as it was processed, cleaned, and aggregated. The data take into account the change that was made to the consumption of home production data to correct an error made in computer data entry, as described in Appendix C. We also re-estimated the housing expenditure variable and changed the definition of agricultural workers to correct some inconsistencies, described in Appendix A.

In view of the fact that GDP growth per capita was negative in 1994, one would expect that the devaluation would not have had a strong impact on reducing poverty by early 1995, when survey results are available. Overall, the survey results, based on the cleaned INS data set (table 2), show that the incidence of poverty increased from 32.3 percent in 1993 to 38.6 percent in 1995. Given the various shortcomings of the surveys-- which are discussed below--the increase in poverty is probably overstated.

While overall there was little change in mean household expenditure and poverty, there were big differences in the changes in mean expenditure and poverty across regions and socioeconomic groups. Within urban and rural areas there was no uniform trend: poverty increased most dramatically in Abidjan, but declined in Other Cities, while within the rural areas, poverty in the East Forest and the Savannah remained essentially unchanged, while poverty worsened significantly in the West Forest. However, first order dominance testing showed that the 1993 and 1995 "poverty incidence curves" (plot of headcount index of poverty on the vertical axis and the poverty line on the horizontal axis) for Other Cities, East Forest, and the Savannah intersect each other repeatedly within the range of 50,000 to 100,000. This CFAF (in 1985 CFAF) indicates that the poverty ranking of the two years is sensitive to the choice of poverty line.

Looking at households classified by the socioeconomic group of the household head --which does not necessarily indicate what the major source of income of the household is'<sup>9</sup> --we find, not too surprisingly, that poverty increased among food crop farmers (table 16). However, poverty also increased slightly among export crop farmers, contrary to our expectations, given the increase in real producer prices. This is primarily due to the large increase in poverty among export crop farmers in the 19 The definition of socioeconomic groups was based first of all on the declared occupation and sector of activity of the household head. Households whose heads, for example, declared themselves to be farmers where then classified into export or food crop households on the basis of whether or not their export crop revenue was at least 50 percent greater than the revenue from marketed sales of food crops. Public sector employee households were classified on the basis of the principal activity of the household head. The definitions used in 1993 and 1995 are not strictly comparable to those used in 1985-1988, which did take into account sources of income.

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