Recession, Recovery and Poverty in Moldova

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldova faced the deepest and most prolonged recession among transition countries, and the resulting increase in poverty has made it the poorest country in Europe today. The main objective of this report is to update and assess poverty in Moldova in its multiple dimensions, with a view to informing public policies. It focuses on the period of recession that followed the Russian crisis and the subsequent recovery. It draws mainly on the Household Budget Surveys, collected quarterly by the Department of Statistics and Sociology, between 1997 and 2002, although the analysis is supplemented as needed by information from other surveys collected by Moldova's Department of Statistic s and Sociology, from administrative data sources, from existing qualitative studies, and from studies by local researchers and other donor organizations. It should be noted that the HBS is a population based survey. By providing detailed information on the consumption of households, it permits an analysis of income (consumption) based welfare. In addition, by providing information on those who do not use public services or programs, in addition to those who do, it provides additional value to administrative data in the analysis of non-income dimensions of poverty such as access to health care or education. As such, the distribution of users of public services such as health care services (for example by rural and urban location) is likely to be different from that obtained from administrative data (typically based on information from facilities). Finally, due to data limitations, the analysis focuses on the Right Bank of Moldova.