Title: The Wall's impact in the Occupied West Bank: A Bayesian Approach to Poverty Dynamics using Repeated Cross Sections

Speaker： Professor Michel Lubrano

Time：9:30AM, April 8th, 2016

Location：The first conference hall in School of Economics, 8th floor of the northern building.

Abstract
In 2002, the Israeli government decided to build a wall inside the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank. The wall had a marked effect on the access to land and water resources as well as to the Israeli labour market. It is difficult to include the effect of the wall in an econometric model explaining poverty as the wall was built in the richer region of the West Bank. We propose in this paper a dynamic model explaining poverty persistence and poverty entry probabilities. As the only available data are repeated cross sections, we propose a Bayesian approach based on latent variables to simulate a pseudo panel. We explain for two periods the income to needs ratio as a function of time invariant exogenous variables. The impact of the wall is measured through a third conditional regression model for the second period which includes state variables from the previous period. Conditional probabilities of poverty persistence and poverty entry are compared to the same marginal probabilities. The wall has increased the probability of poverty persistence by 59 percentage points and the probability of poverty entry by 18 percentage points.