# 5. Results

We start this section with the description of the main outcomes of interest, including households’ vulnerability to poverty and simple comparisons by displacement status and access to PDS. Then we measure the impacts of the PDS program on household welfare by limiting the analytical sample to displaced households. Regression-based associations between access to PDS and the measures of welfare among displaced households using specification 2 are presented next. The probable causal impacts of the PDS on household subjective well-being, food security, poverty, vulnerability, and calorie intake using the PSM technique are presented at the end of the section.

## 5.1 Variable definitions and descriptive findings

Our analysis takes advantage of both the short-form and the long-form questionnaires of the SWIFT survey. The analysis focuses on household consumption, vulnerability to poverty, food security and selfassessment of current and future economic status. While the food security/household hunger and subjective well-being questions were answered by all the households (short-form), information on food consumption and expenditure was collected only on the long-form subsample.

Variables on subjective well-being are presented in Table 3 (Panel A). The survey collected information on what a respondent thinks of her household’s current economic condition, how is it compared to the past condition, and her perceived outlook for the next two years. We combine all three binary variables into one by simply adding them up and call it the subjective well-being index (row A4). Not surprisingly, the displaced paint a gloomier picture about their current economic situations compared to the non-displaced Iraqis (rows A1 and A2). However, they are more optimistic about their future economic prospects (row A3). Responses are more homogeneous among the displaced households regardless of their access to the PDS program.

The SWIFT survey asked four questions regarding household food deprivation in the last 30 days, namely: if any member in a household had to eat fewer meals, if the household ever had no food of any kind to eat, if member(s) went to bed hungry, and if any member went a whole day and night without eating due to lack of resources. The latter three are recommended screening questions by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistant (FANTA) III project (Ballard, et al. 2011) to calculate a household hunger score (HHS).<sup>16</sup> As with subjective economic well-being, we create a household hunger score by simply adding the latter three binary responses. As seen in Panel B (Table 3), the displaced population is significantly more fooddeprived than the non-displaced population. Again, we do not observe much heterogeneity by PDS status when limiting the sample to displaced households only.

The SWIFT survey collected detailed information regarding expenditure on food and non-food items. Following the standard Deaton & Zaidi (2002) consumption aggregate method, we construct each household’s per capita expenditure. The aggregate is used for estimating the country’s official poverty rate and also serves as a focal welfare indicator for this study to determine household’s calorie intake, poverty status, and vulnerability to poverty. Table 4 (Panel A) reports household consumption and poverty status. Displaced households, on average, have lower aggregate expenditure, spend less both on food and

> 16 Usually follow-up questions regarding frequency of deprivation during the 30-day window are asked after a positive response to these three questions. The follow-up responses are used to weigh and classify units into different hunger categories.

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