Abstract
The increasing growth of forced displacement worldwide has led to the stronger interest of various stakeholders in measuring poverty among refugee populations. However, refugee data remain scarce, particularly in relation to the measurement of income, consumption, or expenditure. This paper offers a first attempt to measure poverty among refugees using cross-survey imputations and administrative and survey data collected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan. Employing a small number of predictors currently available in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees registration system, the proposed methodology offers out-of-sample predicted poverty rates. These estimates are not statistically different from the actual poverty rates. The estimates are robust to different poverty lines, they are more accurate than those based on asset indexes or proxy means tests, and they perform well according to targeting indicators. They can also be obtained with relatively small samples. Despite these preliminary encouraging results, it is essential to replicate this experiment across countries using different data sets and welfare aggregates before validating the proposed method.
Highlights
The sharp growth in the global count of forcibly displaced people during the past decade has created new challenges for host governments and aid organizations that will require a new approach to the measurement of poverty.1 Host governments are keen to know the number and status of refugees living in their countries, as they struggle to maintain internal order while assisting the newcomers
We find that the imputation-based poverty estimates provided by the paper are not statistically different from the non-predicted consumption-based poverty rates, and that this result is robust to various validation tests, including alternative poverty lines and disaggregated population groups
We impute from Sample 1 to Sample 2 to obtain the imputation-based poverty rate in Sample 2, and we compare this imputed poverty rate with the true poverty rate that can be directly calculated from Sample 2 for robustness checks
Summary
The sharp growth in the global count of forcibly displaced people during the past decade has created new challenges for host governments and aid organizations that will require a new approach to the measurement of poverty. Host governments are keen to know the number and status of refugees living in their countries, as they struggle to maintain internal order while assisting the newcomers. The sharp growth in the global count of forcibly displaced people during the past decade has created new challenges for host governments and aid organizations that will require a new approach to the measurement of poverty.. Host governments are keen to know the number and status of refugees living in their countries, as they struggle to maintain internal order while assisting the newcomers. The increasingly protracted nature of displacement challenges development organizations to design sustainable poverty reduction programs for displaced people and host communities. For all these actors, measuring poverty among displaced populations has become a key ingredient of any effective economic policy. It becomes increasingly clear that achieving the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) number one goal of poverty reduction will not be possible if the forcibly displaced are excluded from the count
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