Housing conditions in Tunisia: the quantity-quality mismatch

The aim of this paper is to analyze the housing conditions of households in Tunisia, for which we develop an individual indicator of housing adequacy based on dwelling attributes and household size. This indicator has two main advantages: it relies on less arbitrary weights, and it takes the multidimensional housing facets into account in the aggregation process. Using data from Tunisia's national survey on family health and social transformations for two periods (1994 and 2006), our findings are comparable to those from an arbitrary weighting scheme, the most commonly adopted in the literature of multidimensional well-being. In order to identify households suffering from housing deprivation, we develop five housing deprivation thresholds related to some public health issues. Our results suggest that quality-based efforts should be made to reduce the gap in housing conditions between coastal and inland regions and between urban and rural areas. These efforts should be aimed at reducing housing deprivation and preventing health vulnerability among deprived households.