December of 2017. The security crisis was compounded by an economic crisis, which was triggered by the plunge of oil prices in the international market in 2014.

Using data from the 2017-18 Rapid Welfare Monitoring Survey (SWIFT), this study sheds light on the level of resiliency of the PDS program during this recent period of conflict and economic crisis. First, it explores if internally displaced households are less likely to access the PDS benefits and the characteristics associated with access. Second, the study tries to establish a causal role of the PDS program in mitigating welfare losses among the displaced population by measuring the program’s impacts on nutrition (calorie intake and food consumption), its spillover impacts on non-food expenditure including education, and its overall impact on vulnerability to poverty and subjective life assessment using a regression framework and a matching approach.

The analysis finds that compared to non-displaced households, displaced households fare poorly across all measures of welfare. IDPs have lower daily calorie intake and are more likely to face hunger, and they are 18 percentage points more likely to be poor (relative to the poverty rate of 15 percent of nondisplaced). More important, even those who are not in poverty are more vulnerable to falling into poverty, with the probability 17 percentage points higher for displaced households. By their own assessment, their current living conditions are far worse than before January 2014, the onset of the latest wave of displacement.

Access to PDS, however, plays an important role in mitigating the welfare loss. Displaced households that retain the PDS benefits have higher food and non-food expenditures, thus, have lower odds of being in poverty than those who lost access during the displacement. Similarly, the displaced PDS beneficiaries have significantly lower level of vulnerability to poverty, and have higher calorie intake and thus are more food secure than the displaced non-beneficiaries. Although they have a greater total calorie intake, the PDS beneficiaries consume significantly fewer calories from non-ration food than the comparison displaced non-beneficiaries. Combining the program’s positive impact on non-food consumption with this result suggests that the constant supply of ration food may ease the strain of fulfilling households’ calorie requirement, freeing up resources that can be diverted to other needs. However, our other results suggest that the PDS program alone is not sufficient to alter one’s overall economic outlook during the time of economic distress – we find zero statistical association between one’s subjective perception of his/her overall economic situation and the ration program. These results along with the results from the comparison of displaced and non-displaced households suggest that forced displacement distresses one’s economic condition to such an extent that the food ration program compensates some of the welfare loss and reduces vulnerability, but is unable to reinstate the displaced families to their original level of wellbeing.

Despite a recent expansion of a targeted cash assistance program, PDS remains the only notable social assistance program in Iraq (largely because its size and cost, which divert resources away from other social protection spending and programs). Because all households are eligible to receive it, the program reached almost 99 percent of the population before the crisis (World Bank 2010, 2014).<sup>5</sup> Our results suggest that

> 5 The only cash transfer scheme in the country is the Social Safety Net (SSN) program, which has limited coverage. Before the reforms initiated in 2015, the use of demographic characteristics rather than a poverty criterion for targeting resulted in most of the poor being left out of the cash transfer program. Only 11 percent of the poor received benefits, while of those receiving benefits, only 26 percent were poor. A poverty targeting criterion was introduced for SSN transfers starting in 2015 after the new Social Protection Law for Iraq (Law 11/2014). The

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