اندازه گيري فقر در ايران

Changes in Poverty in Iran

The purpose of this study is to analyse the degree of poverty in Iran and how it changed over time during the implementation of a stabilisation and adjustment programme started in 1989. It does this by documenting overall poverty levels and poverty within subgroups, using the micro-level data set of household expenditure survey conducted by the Statistical Centre of Iran (SCI) in 1989 and 1994. The former year was the initial year of the Islamic Republicʹs first five-year plan, and the latter was the year following the planʹs final year. This paper is organised as follows. Section 1 shortly describes the data sets. Section 2 deals with establishing a proper poverty line for Iran. This section also introduces a new equivalence scale for adjusting differences in needs. Section 3 compares poverty in 1989 and 1994 using first stochastic dominance check. Section 4 provides higher order dominance checks. Section 5 estimates the level of, and changes in, Poverty in Iran using some scalar poverty measures. Section 6 investigates the sensitivity of poverty estimates to the choice of the price index. The paper ends with a conclusion list . We have found an increase in all poverty measures in urban and rural areas and the country as whole except a fall in the distribution sensitive measure for urban areas during the adjustment policy, 1989-1994. In other words, in rural area of Iran the impact of adjustment policy on the welfare of the poor was negative whereas in urban area of Iran, in spite of an increase in incidence of poverty (%4), the poorest people benefited from distributional change during the first five-year plan (1989-1993). In short, apart from an empirical work on poverty in Iran, this paper also provides a new equivalence scale and highlights the magnitude of the adjustment factors for measuring poverty.