War aggravating poverty in Angola

Although there is a large body of research devoted to the investigation of the causes of poverty, none of these studies has treated and modeled war as the main contributing factor to the impoverished welfare of Angola. The study addresses this issue, in three main ways. First, a temporal poverty profile is constructed for the two periods, 1995/96 and 2000/2001. This kind of temporal poverty profile provides the trend of poverty measures over time. We are able to compare poverty measures for the two periods using the Household Budget Surveys (HBS) data. Results from this analysis indicate that poverty has increased over time. Secondly, the use of a path diagram is applied to shed some light on the effects of war on welfare determinants. These are assumed to be total household per adult equivalent expenditure and poverty level incidence. This method throws some insight on how these war effects may be direct or indirect with respect to the household welfare proxies. Thirdly, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are implemented. The results are that war decreases the mean consumption per adult equivalent and increases the Poverty incidence level. These results support all the hypotheses stated in this study.