Towards Dynamic Assessment of Determinants of Household Vulnerability to Poverty in Tanzania

The paper examines the determinants of vulnerability to expected poverty in Tanzania. Following Landau et al. (2012), Chaudhuri (2000) and Chaudhuri et al. (2003) on estimating Vulnerability to Expected Poverty (VEP), the paper uses a three waves of Tanzania National Panel Survey Data for Tanzania collected between 2008/2009, 2010/2011 and 2012/2013 to find that being employed in agriculture, residing in rural area and household size turns out to be significantly more likely to be poor in the future, at a given consumption level and in all cross-section combination. It also appeared that most of the variables were statistically insignificant at influencing the conditional variance of future consumption across household characteristics. Lastly, nearly 39.42% and 59.49% of households who were poor in 2008 turned out to be less vulnerable in 2010 and 2012 respectively and the rest turned out to be high vulnerable. Thus, consumption stabilization strategies are likely to be influential if they target families whose household head is aging.