basic needs, defined by the national poverty line.<sup>2</sup> A new IE-LFS was started in April 2021 (IE-LFS 202122). However, due to the rapidly deteriorating security situation, fieldwork was suspended in June 2021. Data collected between April and June 2021 cover a total of 4,871 households. Information from the ILLFS 2021 provides an additional baseline and benchmark model performance.

The regime change brought a halt to data collection in the country. To understand the evolution of welfare, the World Bank implemented three rounds of the Afghanistan Welfare Monitoring Survey (AWMS), a phone survey covering a wide range of indicators, including employment and labor earnings, food security and access to safety nets, school attendance, and health services. The phone surveys are administered on the subsample of the original IE-LFS 2019/20 and IE-LFS 2021 participants for which phone numbers were available.

As expected from a phone survey, the sample of phone owners includes some expected biases, given that (i) not all of the households from IELFS provided telephone numbers, and those who do are, on average, better off; and (ii) not all of the available numbers could be reached.<sup>3</sup> Sampling differences in the AWMS are adjusted by reweighting to match the original full IE-LFS 2019/20 distributions. These adjustments reduced the biases, although the final sample is still slightly more educated. Additionally, as found in previous AWMS rounds, household size is relatively larger, possibly reflecting internal migration dynamics and/or household consolidation. Overall, the differences in welfare and education levels are not large enough to introduce crippling biases to the results, and every category considered has substantial representation (Figure 1). The next section further discusses the comparability of the IE-LFS 2019/20 and AWMS R3 samples.

> 2 In line with best international practices, the poverty line for Afghanistan is estimated following the Cost of Basic Needs (CBN) methodology. There are no PPP conversion factors available in Afghanistan to convert the value of the national line into international lines.

> 3 In order to correct for these possible sources of selection bias and to preserve the national representativeness of the sample of completed interviews, we implemented a four-step process. First, the sampling weights for all households interviewed in the two IELFS rounds were harmonized so that the consolidated sample could match the population size and distribution coming from the original sampling frame. Second, the new sampling weights for the households that provided a telephone number in the IELFS rounds were adjusted so that this sub-sample could be used to estimate nationally representative estimates. This adjustment was based on the probabilities of each household providing a telephone number in the IELFS rounds, as predicted by their socioeconomic characteristics (such as region, urban/rural, access to electricity, and household assets). Third, a readjustment was conducted on the sample of households with completed interviews accounting for the panel status of the household and the probabilities of completing the interview (again, as predicted by sociodemographic characteristics). Finally, poststratification of the sampling weights by regions trimmed excessively large weights to reduce their impact on estimate standard errors.

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