The 1995/1996 Household Income, Expenditure - (PDF, 101 mb ...

VI.26
cases does not rise throughout the curve of household expenditure quintiles.
Since each quintile represents 2,961 households, one can infer that about 48%
(1,420/2,961) of households in the second quintile owned a fan, etc. It is
surprising, at least for the highest quintile, that so few households own a
personal computer. The present lack of a technology base has wide-ranging
implications for technology transfer, in general, and access and dissemination
policies, in particular.
VLF.3 Average Housing Expenditure
Table VI.5 has the estimates of survey weighted actual housing
expenditures by the same categories - area, tenure, and raw expenditure
class. Suez is the most expensive city for housing, and it is relatively cheap
to dwell in rural Upper Egypt. Annual housing costs are about $109.00 per
year in rural Assiut. Rural housing is cheaper than urban housing overall.
Furnished renters are, indeed, paying a very high premium by being under a
rent contract, although the standard error of the furnished rent estimate is
rather high. Housing costs rise directly with raw expenditures, and so do
standard errors (at least at the higher expenditure levels), indicating
heteroskedasticity in the housing cost estimates.
VLF.4 Imputed Valuation of Dwellings, the Key Money Proxy
Table VI,6 shows estimates of the ratio of keyrent to housing
expenditures. As stated above, this is expected to deviate from 1.0 more for
renters than for owners, as it does. Still the value 1.27 for owners suggests
that owners believe they could earn 27% more by renting out their dwelling
unconditionally than they could if they put their dwelling in an auction of
dwellings with similar age, taxes, and amenities. In other words, owners feel
that those three variables are limited for capturing valuation overall. The
comparison between the ratio for ordinary rent (1.55) and furnished rent (.90)
is striking - it is obvious that ordinary renters realize that they are reaping
consumer surplus, and that furnished renters think they are paying too much.
Because the keyrent-to-actual-expenditure ratio is heavily influenced by the
extent of renting, it is hard to present an interpretation of geography on the
index. People in urban areas believe that they could get 46% more than their
actual or imputed values if they put their dwelling onto the market. In the
rural areas the estimate of consumer surplus is only 21%. In the rural
Frontier the index is 1.0; people generally believe they are getting the fair
market value they pay for or expect. Finally, as household annual
expenditure levels rise, the subjective valuation gradually decreases.
However, before inferring that the poorest expenditure levels believe
themselves to be getting the most for their money, the expenditures should be
scaled for equivalence.
A final question concerns the comparison of economic well-being between
renters and owners, given the subjective valuation of the key money proxy.
We define the difference between key money and paid rent (for renters) or
owners equivalent rents (for owners) to signify relative consumer surplus.
The comparison uses hedonic indices of housing amenities evaluated at the
means for each sample. Table VI.7 shows the results of both hedonic
regressions for renters and owners. For both groups, the index of consumer
surplus (the sum of the products of the estimates and their sample mean