Module: Urban Poverty Analysis
Exercise 5: City Poverty Analysis Case Study
Task. Please form working groups with two or maximum three of your fellow
participants. Then please read these instructions together. You will have 15 minutes to
discuss the questions. At the end, we will discuss the answers together. What follows is
first a short description of life in ‘Bantara’, a medium- to large city somewhere in East
Asia. Following the description are four questions – please discuss the questions using
the data information provided on the attached page.
Bantara. With about 1.5 million inhabitants, Bantara is the fourth largest city in
the country of Paturien. It is a regional capital and a hub for commerce since it is the
main trading center with a large port. Over the past decade, a very large in-migration to
Bantara took place, almost doubling its population since 1980.
Until 1996, almost 90
percent of city revenues were passed from the central government and for many years
these transfers were constant in real terms. In a time of rapid population growth,
Bantara had consequently little revenues to provide basic services to new settlements
which makes the distribution of services extremely unequal in the city – except for
electricity which is generally accessible.
Since 1996 a comprehensive decentralization process has increased local taxing
possibilities which now account for more than 50 percent of city revenues. Most
important among local taxes and surcharges are the property tax and a local ‘head’ tax
which is collected once a year from every household (for each person living in the
household 6 patures have to be paid). Together with revenue decentralization, cities in
Paturien have acquired higher functional responsibility: both capital and recurrent
expenditure decisions of the main public services (water, sanitation, electricity and
garbage collection) are now all decided by municipalities in Paturien.
Bantara is divided into seven districts (A to G), each with a district government.
Currently, major expenditure decisions are almost exclusively made at the city level but
executed by the district governments. Since the decentralization law became effective,
the government of Bantara has made it its stated objective ‘to direct most of city
expenditures to the poor’.
Chart 1: Population Distribution by District,
1999
A
9%
G
24%
F
5%
E
16%
D
12%
B
13%
C
21%
TABLE 1: Service access rate, by district, (in percent of population), 1999
District
water access
electricity
Access
sanitation
access
garbage
collection
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
85
90
54
70
75
76
34
97
95
99
100
94
89
92
84
89
50
69
78
80
29
78
45
70
65
50
85
19
Total City
63
95
61
52
TABLE 2: Service access rate, by district, (in percent of population), 1996
District
water
Access
electricity
access
sanitation
access
garbage
collection
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
69
72
51
67
68
69
32
95
93
99
100
92
87
91
67
70
47
65
69
77
29
75
40
55
63
30
80
2
Total City
56
94
52
40
TABLE 3: Service Satisfaction: Percent of Those Receiving Services Satisfied with Quality, 1999
District
water
Access
electricity
access
sanitation
access
garbage
collection
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
97
92
90
76
39
96
59
100
99
100
93
94
95
96
98
90
89
80
25
95
67
70
56
86
69
51
70
95
Total City
74
97
74
74
TABLE 4: Poverty Indicators, 1999, by district
District
income pov.
rate, percent
extreme pov.
rate, percent
malnutrition
percent
infant mortality literacy
per 1000 births percent of adults
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
10
10
35
17
23
24
49
2
3
14
9
16
8
18
9
11
25
19
39
24
34
11
14
35
30
67
38
52
95
89
91
88
93
94
87
Total City
28
12
25
39
90
TABLE 5: Tax revenues of the city, by district, 1999
Property tax
(‘000)
(%)
Local head tax
(‘000)
(%)
Total
(‘000)
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
243
275
683
712
189
423
199
( 8)
( 10)
(25)
(26)
( 7)
(16)
( 7)
135
78
283
144
168
75
216
(12)
( 7)
(26)
(13)
(15)
( 7)
(20)
378
353
966
856
357
498
415
Total
2724
(100)
1100
(100)
3823
Questions:
1.
Describe the poverty situation in the town of Bantara. Would one poverty
indicator be sufficient to describe the poverty, especially its spatial dimension?
Does the data give you some clues why the district with the worst health
conditions (highest malnutrition and infant mortality rates) appears to be
deprived ? (use Tables 1,3 and 4)?
2.
If you look at the geographical distribution of tax revenues in the city, is the tax
burden equally shared? Does the data allow you to assess whether the local
property tax and the local head tax are progressive (i.e., the better off pay a
higher share of their total income in taxes than the poor) or not?
Bantara was not able to provide us with detailed expenditure data of the city, especially
the geographical distribution of expenditure on basic services. However, does the data
in the tables allow you to assess how the city has spent its resources in these areas over
the past years? Were expenditures pro-poor or not? How would you hence assess
Bantara’s success in ‘directing most if not all its expenditures’ to the poor?