necessary for farm work but also owning smaller animals and birds that are better associated with consumption. In fact, chicken and sheep are the most common types of livestock.

With regards to ownership of jewelry, the survey reports the gram weight of gold and silver held by the households. In contrast to livestock ownership, only 14 percent of households reported owning either gold or silver. The ownership of gold or silver is higher in Kunarha and Khost where around 40 percent of households report owning some amount of gold and/or silver. Interestingly, livestock ownership is also higher in these provinces. Yet, in many provinces, there is almost no ownership of gold and silver. Less than 1 percent of households in Baghlan, Ghor, and Zabul have some wealth in the form of gold and silver. No household in our sample from Nooristan and Daykundi had any ownership of gold and silver either. Figure 1 shows the average value of gold and silver and livestock across the provinces. Not only do more households own livestock, we find that livestock accounts for a large share of wealth in each province.

In addition to our narrow measure of wealth, we use information from the survey to construct another broader measure of wealth. Specifically, we augment the narrow measure to include any savings from the previous year less any debt that a household owes. The savings from the previous year is defined as annual income in excess of annual non-durable expenditure. Our motivation for including savings from the previous year is based on the notion that there may be a lag in converting such savings to assets which we observe in the narrow measure. Around half of the households in the sample reported having any debt. As is the case with asset ownership, there are huge variations in debt across provinces. Almost every household in Ghor in our sample reported having a debt obligation. The debt was also high in the provinces of Kunarha and Urozgan. In sharp contrast, households in Paktika and Faryab had minimal debt obligations. In figure 2, we show the average annual income and expenditure across the provinces. Average annual income ranges from more than AFN 200,000 in Kabul and Khost to just around AFN 50,000 in Ghor and Daykundi. In line with income, Kabul also has the highest level of annual expenditure. Average expenditure is also high in Helmand, almost as high as the average annual income for the province, resulting in a low savings rate. Daykundi and Ghor have the lowest levels of average expenditure in line with their lower average incomes.

We note that our measure of wealth does not include housing wealth. To be effective as an instrument of self-insurance, an asset needs to be liquid so that it can be readily exchanged when needed. Housing wealth, however, tends to be relatively much less liquid than other assets and we do not view this exclusion as a severe concern. Nonetheless, we attempt to account for housing wealth by adding controls for house ownership. Specifically, the ALCS data allow us to identify whether a particular household owns a house or not. Furthermore, we can also identify the broad characteristics of the house which we control for. Houses in Afghanistan range from temporary 6