this magnitude, the dramatic reduction in poverty would be understandable. Given the increase in poverty in urban areas, and return migration from the urban areas to the countryside, the labor constraints may slacken and real wages fall over the next few years. However, one should be careful in interpreting the results of the socioeconomic breakdown in the survey data, as we do not know what percentage of household income is made up of wage labor, and whether wage incomes increased in the households classified as wage laborers. Moreover, given the various categories of hired labor that exist, it is not clear that the surveys do an adequate job of identifying all the various forms of hired labor and coding them correctly. So it is entirely possible that the observed decline in poverty in this group of households may have little or nothing to do with labor earnings per se.

There was a substantial increase in poverty among public sector employees, as expected given that real public sector wage bill declined in real terms. Following the devaluation in January 1994, the government granted a 10 percent increase in wages and salaries across the board, although fringe benefits remained unchanged. Thus, the overall increase in personnel remuneration amounted to about 8 percent. The number of employees remained essentially unchanged. The rate of inflation between the two surveys was 48 percent for Abidjan (the pre-devaluation survey was conducted April-May 1992) and 43 percent for the rest of the country (the pre-devaluation survey was conducted between JuneNovember 1993). Thus remuneration of Abidjan civil servants fell by 27 percent in real terms, while remuneration of civil servants outside Abidjan fell by 24 percent. The survey data show that household expenditure per capita of Abidjan public employee households fell by 15 percent, while expenditure per capita of public sector employee households in Other Cities fell by 24 percent. Thus, it seems that public sector employee households in Abidjan were better placed to draw on other sources of income or savings to mitigate the decline in their public sector salaries than public sector employees outside Abidjan.

Tlhe outcome for the informal sector seems to be strongly influenced by the outcome of other segments of the local economy. The big difference between Abidjan and Other Cities is that poverty in the informal sector (i.e. employees in the informal sector or self-employed) in Abidjan showed a big increase, while in Other Cities it declined (table 18). Informal sector households in Other Cities may have benefited from higher derived demand from the rural areas and have more agricultural income. It is hard to draw firm conclusions about self-employed in rural areas, since the sample size of the rural self-employed in 1995 amounts to only 5 percent of the population; poverty declined among these households in West Forest and the Savannah, but increased in East Forest.

**Table 18 Urban Headcount Index of Poverty by Major Socioeconomic Group** _(Poverty Line = 75,000 CFAF per year in 1985 CFAF)_

||_Abi_|_djan_|_Othe_|_r Cities_|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|_Socioeconomic Group_|_1993_|_1995_|_1993_|_1995_|
|Public sector employee|0.002|0.065|0.140|0.274|
|Private sector formal employee|0.049|0.055|0.128|0.188|
|Informal sector|0.058|0.291|0.338|0.278|

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