Floods and poverty dynamics among Bangladeshi households

Anuja Jayaraman, Pennsylvania State University
Jill L. Findeis, Pennsylvania State University

South Asia has the largest concentration of the worlds’ poor, with over half a billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day and nearly half of Bangladesh’s population of 135 million people live below the poverty line. Bangladesh is also one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world (World Bank 2003). The paper proposes to analyze issues relating to chronic and transient poverty following a negative income shock experienced by Bangladeshi households using longitudinal household data. In order to understand the poverty dynamics the paper first attempts of categorize the households as never poor, chronically poor and transient poor following the 1998 flood in Bangladesh. The second objective is to estimate multinomial logit model to examine the determinants of chronic and transient poor and to study factors that enabled some households cope better than the others.