Estimating Poverty in Afghanistan Without Consumption Data: An Imputation-Based Approach

Oscar Barriga-Cabanillas, Parth Chawla, Silvia Redaelli and Nobuo Yoshida

Journal of Development Studies, 2026, vol. 62, issue 7, 1126-1147

Abstract: The last official household survey in Afghanistan showed that in 2020, close to half of the population of the country was living below the national poverty line. Since then, the country has experienced significant economic and social challenges following the change in political regime in 2021. This paper uses the latest developments in survey-to-survey imputations to estimate comparable poverty rates for Afghanistan. The analysis uses the latest household survey available and imputes poverty on the Afghanistan Welfare Monitoring Survey– a phone survey sampled from the same universe of individuals. Results show that 48.3 percent of the Afghan population was poor as of April-June 2023, a relative decline of 4 percentage points compared to the same months in 2020. The reduction in poverty was concentrated among rural households, with a decline from 51 to 44 percent, while it stagnated in urban areas at around 58 percent. The analysis accounts for seasonality in welfare patterns and implements several tests to validate the results. Trends in the evolution of self-reported welfare and food security make it reasonable to conclude that poverty first increased during the immediate economic contraction following the regime change, and then progressively stabilised.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2025.2601588 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:62:y:2026:i:7:p:1126-1147

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FJDS20

DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2025.2601588

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Studies is currently edited by Howard White, Oliver Morrissey and Ken Shadlen

More articles in Journal of Development Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().