Oil price shocks, poverty, and gender: a social accouting matrix analysis for Kenya

In a similar way to Input-Output (IO) tables, Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) have been used in the literature mostly to assess the distributional impact of changes in production structure on household income. Yet they can also be used to assess the impact on price shocks on the cost of goods consumed by households. The key advantage of SAMs over IO tables is that the data from household surveys on the incomes and consumption patterns of various categories of households can be directly integrated into the modeling exercise in order to conduct the distributional analysis. This is illustrated with a discussion of the impact of oil price shocks in Kenya on different types of households defined according to the gender of the household head as well as poverty status. We find that due to some differences in consumption patterns, poorer households are likely to be affected more by oil price hikes than the non-poor, and that household with female heads could also be more affected than households with male heads