Documents de travail

In 2003, Chadian authorities passed the Law N° 001/PR/1999, establishing rules for allocating and managing the expected oil royalties from the Doba Oil project. The oil producing region’s share amounts to 5% of oil revenues under this law in addition to other benefits related to its status in order to mitigate negative effects of the oil project. Many field studies attempted to assess poverty situation in this region. Yet, no rigorous method of impact assessment has been employed. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the poverty profile in this region, by combining a double difference estimator with propensity score matching methods. Using data from the «Survey on Consumption and the Informal Sector in Chad» carried out in 2003 and 2011, our results tend to show that the monetary poverty increased in the oil producing region compared to control regions. We find no evidence that the nonmonetary poverty decreased in the producing region, as the important investments in social infrastructures could have implicitly suggested. In addition, we notice that household expenditures for temptation goods increased in this region compared to the others. Finally, we observe that there are spillover effects. Especially the neighboring regions of the oil producing region are more likely to experience poverty. These results raise the issue of the efficiency of the law and of its enlargement to newly discovered oil fields.

Oil resources have enabled Chad to increase public financing for education and to achieve high economic growth rates. Regarding these policies to supporting the education sector, we assume that the standard of living of households does not explain the school attendance. We test empirically this hypothesis using data from the MICS conducted in 2010 and Education Statistical Yearbooks. Using a bivariate probit model, the results show that school attendance and child labor depend of households’ standard of living after controlling for other relevant characteristics. In particular, a child from a non-poor household has a lower (higher) probability to be involved in the child labor (enrolled in school) compared to a child from a poor household. Although these results are classical in the economic literature, they are rather surprising in the case of Chad regarding the priority given to education by authorities. We identify four possible explanations, (i) the low level of these investments compared to international standards; (ii) the loss of public expenditures, caused by institutional factors; (iii) the misallocation of educational infrastructures and human resources by region and (iv) an inequity sharing of spin-offs of economic growth induced by oil resources. These results raise the issue of the sustainability of the Chadian economy after oil.