biases generally point in the direction of an overestimate of poverty in 1995, there are still a number of unknowns--particularly the small sample size and lack of region-specific price data--that make it impossible to draw firm conclusions about the direction of the change in poverty between 1993 and 1995.

The deficiencies of the 1993 and 1995 household surveys lead to a number of recommendations to improve the reliability of the conclusions. First, more attention needs to be paid to assuring the comparability of the surveys as well as to developing region-specific consumer price indicators if one of the purposes of the household surveys is to monitor the change in poverty over time. A particularly important issue for surveys of the priority-type format is the reliability and comparability over time of the method used to estimate food expenditures. A second lesson is that the ability to explain the trends observed in the poverty data depends to a large part on being able to understand the trends in the various components of household income. This is a weak point of many household surveys, especially household priority surveys. A third recommendation would be to pursue some of the qualitative analysis once the results of the quantitative surveys are available to explore whether the trends reported in the data make sense on the ground. A fourth recommendation would be to give some thought to sample size so that region-specific cell sizes for the major socioeconomic groups are sufficiently large to make meaningful comparisons possible. For example, given the difference in pricing policies applied to cocoa and coffee, it would be interesting in future studies to examine the evolution of poverty between these two groups of farmers. A fifth recommendation would be to examine how well the socioeconomic classification used in the 1993 and 1995 surveys correlates with the primary source of income of the household.33 A sixth recommendation would be to consider in greater detail whether the limited time frame of the priority survey will yield accurate estimates of expenditure given seasonality in expenditures. If a limited time frame is adopted, including questions on normative monthly food purchases would be a useful supplement to the monthly recall estimate for those households that do not purchase an item during all months of the year.

Three puzzles emerge from the household survey data that merit special consideration in future household surveys in CMte d'Ivoire. First, what accounts for the huge increase in poverty at various points in time in the West Forest ? Are there special sampling problems in the West Forest? Or special difficulties in estimating the value of consumption of home production? Second, why did the Savannah do relatively much better than the Forest region after the devaluation? Here one suspects that the problem may be misspecification of the regional deflators. But perhaps off-farm sources of income may vary significantly from the rest of the country. And third, did the situation of agricultural workers really improve between 1993 and 1995? If so, will it continue to improve? What will happen to labor earnings as the land frontier vanishes? Labor will become a less scarce commodity, and the forms of labor hire, which have depended heavily on sharecropping-type contracts which give the sharecropper eventual rights to the land, will likely shift. It would be useful in future surveys to think about ways of distinguishing among different types of agricultural workers. At this point in time, the household surveys in C6te d'Ivoire raise as many questions as they answer about the changes in poverty over time.

33 Unfortunately the analyses that have been carried out of poverty rates among different socioeconomic groups with respec **t** o the 1985-1988 do not provide information about how the classification of the socioeconomic groups correlates with sources of income.

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