Assessing the Extent of Monetary Poverty in the Syrian Arab Republic after a Decade of Conflict

The data for estimating monetary poverty in the Syrian Arab Republic are outdated. In the context of data scarcity, this paper aims to propose a methodological approach to address the knowledge gap regarding welfare in Syria over the past decade. In particular, the analysis provides (i) updated pre-conflict poverty baseline estimates based on grouped data from the 2009 Household Income and Expenditure Survey; (ii) supporting evidence on the viability of using Humanitarian Needs Assessment Programme Demographic and Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene 2022 survey data for the estimation of monetary poverty in 2022; and (iii) supporting theoretical and empirical evidence to identify growth in per capita gross domestic product in current prices deflated by Consumer Price Index as the best metric to project poverty using a nowcasting approach. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes to use 2022 Humanitarian Needs Assessment Programme–based poverty estimates to anchor the most recent estimates to the best available evidence, and to interpolate the poverty evolution obtained from back-casting 2022 and nowcasting 2009 poverty estimates over 2009–22 using the growth rate of per capita gross domestic product in current prices, deflated by the Consumer Price Index with a passthrough of 0.7.