Fact Checking the Arab Media

On October 26, 2021, Manel Dridi wrote an article entitled Tunisia Facing Increasing Poverty and Regional Inequalities in Sada, the online journal of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program. She claims: “The worsening of disparities proves that reforms initiated by governments since 2011 and the strategies implemented by the development plan have failed to ensure social justice and create regional cohesion…Today, Tunisia is afflicted by increasing economic disparities.” The evidence presented in the article does not match these claims, however. The official statistics included in the article cover only the last five years and the author provides estimates on poverty and unemployment rates, regional development indicators and GDP. Nowhere in the article does she present estimates on income or wealth or regional inequalities.

At least two studies contract the allegation advanced in the article. The first is a new report on the recent trends of “Poverty and Inequality in Tunisia” produced by Deeksha Kokas (World Bank), Abdel-Rahman El Lahga (University of Tunis) and Gladys Lopez-Acevedo, (World Bank) and published by the German Institute of Labour Economics. The second is a 2018 study on labor income inequalities in Tunisia produced by Roxane Zighed (Paris School of Economics) under the supervision of Thomas Piketty.

The first study shows that inequality - measured in terms of Gini and Theil indexes - declined modestly during the last five years of Ben Ali’s rule (2005-2009), but declined more significantly during the last decade. In fact, by examining inequality trends in Tunisia, the three authors found that income inequality decreased more rapidly after the revolution in 2011. The Gini index fell from 0.4 in 2000 to 0.37 in 2015, and further to 0.33 in 2019.

Furthermore, while it is true that considerable disparities exist in both urban and rural areas, urban areas, in fact, registered a higher Gini coefficient of 0.35 while those in rural areas stood at 0.32 in 2015. Still, the gap between urban and rural Gini coefficients narrowed between 2015 and 2019 from 3.1 to 1.5 percentage points. So although the gap between urban and rural areas remains high, it actually narrowed in recent years. Zighed’s study additionally suggests that the level of labor income inequality was high during the 2005-2015 period. Using data from the Social Security Administration, the author found that labor income inequality actually increased in pre-revolutionary Tunisia, and decreased in post-revolutionary Tunisia.