Household Expenditure Polarization: Evidence from The Arab Region

Abstract This paper analyzes the trend and changes of household expenditure polarization in five Arab countries between 1975 and 2006. Applying a set of recent polarization measures developed by Duclos et al. (2004) and Wolfson (1994), we find that polarization remained stable in most countries except Yemen which witnessed a significant increase of polarization during the period 1998–2006. While bi-polarization evolves in the same direction as inequality, our empirical results show that polarization per se behaves differently from inequality. The decomposition of polarization by geographical region shows that in all five countries’ household expenditures are spatially polarized, where nearly 80% of overall polarization is explained by intra-regional polarization. Arabic Abstract: