more than 95 percent of its exports, the fall in oil prices was catastrophic. The fiscal deficit reached 11.0 percent of GDP in 2015 and 13.4 percent in 2016 (World Bank 2018).

The dual crises have been costly to Iraq’s economy. The economy is yet to recover from the crash of 2014. After contracting for three consecutive years – 2014 (-3.9 percent), 2015 (-9.6 percent), and 2016 (-8.1 percent) –non-oil GDP showed modest growth in 2017 and 2018 (International Monetary Fund 2017). Oil prices remain below that which is needed for Iraq to achieve fiscal balance and external account balance. Had it continued to grow at the pre-conflict rate, non-oil GDP would have been far higher than where it is today. Absent the emergence and spread of Daesh, Iraq’s economy would have been a quarter larger in real terms in 2015 (Ianchovichina and Ivanic 2014). This contraction is a product of the direct effects stemming from the destruction of infrastructure, disruption to trade, refugee outflows and loss in productivity, and the indirect effects of the opportunity cost of deeper trade integration with neighbors. By 2017, the loss had ballooned to an estimated 72 percent of the 2013 GDP (World Bank 2018).

The crises have also exacted a toll on people’s well-being. Iraq had been making slow but steady progress in poverty reduction, with the poverty rate declining from 22.4 percent in 2007 to 18.9 percent in 2012. During this period, a lion’s share of the increase in per capita consumption, and consequently decrease in poverty, was due to the rise in labor income (World Bank 2014). But the twin shocks of 2014 more than eroded five years’ worth of progress in poverty reduction, with the poverty rate climbing back to 22.5 percent in 2014 (Krishnan and Olivieri 2016). Three years after the onset of the crises, the living standards are still below the 2012 level, with the poverty rate in 2017-18 estimated at 20.0 percent (World Bank 2019).<sup>6</sup> The crises have especially affected internally displaced persons. The immediate impacts of the crises on IDPs were severe, when per capita _income_ in IDP households dropped by 62 percent, while per capita _consumption_ fell by 22 percent (Krishnan and Olivieri 2016).<sup>7</sup> By 2017-18, the displacement impact had only compounded, with IDPs almost three times as likely to be poor and be vulnerable to poverty as nonIDPs (World Bank 2019).

# 3. Data

This study uses data from the 2017-18 Rapid Welfare Monitoring Survey (SWIFT) conducted by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO) and Kurdistan Regional Statistics Organization (KRSO). The survey was conceived with the express purpose of tracking household well-being at a time when it was infeasible to implement full-scale household surveys in Iraq. Its objective was to provide interim estimates of welfare and well-being until another survey comparable in scope and coverage to the Integrated Household and Socioeconomic Survey (IHSES) could be fielded. Many questions in the 2017 questionnaire were taken from previous rounds of IHSES. A few new modules were added to the 2017 survey to understand how the crises might have left the population more vulnerable, the mechanisms through which people coped with shocks, and how they assessed their own life situation.

> 6 The 2012, 2014, and 2017-18 poverty estimates are not strictly comparable. The 2014 estimates are based on microsimulation. The 2017-18 survey collected consumption information using recall method (compared to diary method for 2012 and 2014), and the survey was not collected over a 12-month period to account for seasonal variation.

> 7 The drop in per capita consumption was lower than that in income, presumably due to consumption smoothing.

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