on time, and at low cost. Furthermore, food ration may not be appropriate in fragile settings where the risk of conflict is high. Delivery of food to local agents is but the last step in a long logistical chain, and disruption in one link of the chain will disrupt the final delivery of food. Active conflict and general insecurity may disrupt delivery of food, depriving the population of food support at a time of high need.

Our study was designed to shed light on the performance of the PDS in its current form in providing a social protection floor to Iraqi households during emergency. It cannot speak directly to the larger question of whether universal food subsidy is the most effective and efficient way to deliver social assistance in Iraq. There is, however, scope to redesign the PDS in the margins to make it more effective. To access the PDS benefits, households must have a PDS card with the number of household members listed on it and the benefits are received from a designated local ration agent. When a household moves to a new location, it must establish its residency in the new place. Only then can it request its ration card to be transferred to an agent in the new location. Until recently, the applications had to be sent to the Ministry of Trade office in Baghdad, which made the process cumbersome.<sup>26</sup> Establishing residency and proving identity might be especially difficult for displaced households if their documents have been lost or damaged. Simplifying the procedures for transferring residency and agent affiliation can prevent displaced households from losing access to an important source of calories and implicit income at a time when the support is most needed. Instituting an e-distribution platform, such as the one World Food Program (WFP) is piloting in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade through digitalization of the beneficiaries’ database and biometric registration, may enable displaced persons to update their location information more easily and, thus, may speed up the process of transferring the affiliation from an agent at the place of origin to a new agent at the current location.

Iraq could also consider targeting the benefits to only poor households or those in the bottom parts of income distribution. This would allow the government to increase the benefits per beneficiary or use the fiscal savings to expand poverty-targeted social safety net (SSN) programs. Indeed, one of the reasons why non-subsidy social safety net programs in Iraq remain stunted is because PDS absorbs a large amount of the government budget. The poverty targeting criteria introduced in 2015 and currently used for the cash transfer program provide a natural starting point to identify PDS beneficiaries. If a transition from universal eligibility to poverty-targeted distribution is thought to be too disruptive, the eligibility threshold can be set generously high to encompass, say, the poorest 60 percent of households.

In the long term, the PDS program can be gradually phased out and replaced by a poverty-targeted cash transfer program (conditional or unconditional). Before doing so, however, a robust system must be in place to enroll beneficiaries, verify that they meet the necessary conditions (in case of conditional transfer), and deliver the benefits. Additionally, any PDS reform should be accompanied by a compensatory measure for those current beneficiaries that are likely to be impacted negatively by the reform. Previous studies have found that household consumption of PDS items is relatively inelastic to price changes (Krishnan, Olivieri and Ramadan 2019). Without the compensating differential provided by the new programs, removal of subsidies may have a large negative impact on current beneficiaries’ household budget, household welfare, and calorie intake.

Alternatively, the Indonesian replacement to its subsidized food program could be considered. As discussed, Rastra (originally Raskin) was a food distribution program. Rastra has been well-studied, due to its large coverage and historically weak targeting accuracy (see for example Alderman, Gentilini and

> 26 In the interim, it was not uncommon for households to make periodic trips to their original location to collect the benefits.

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