# 6. Conclusions

Household budget surveys (HBSs) are crucial to establish poverty monitoring systems and to design evidence-based policies. This paper summarized microdata challenges the MENA region faces related to measuring well-being and discussed ways to overcome these challenges.

Despite improvements in public access to microdata, data availability is poor in the MENA region, comparable to the much poorer Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and lags the rest of the world. Lack of data timeliness further compounds the availability challenge: seven of the 13 developing countries in MENA had fewer than three surveys between 2004 and 2018. In many countries, the most recent surveys were conducted between 2006 and 2014, making their data outdated. HBSs also become outdated for other reasons: some countries take an exceedingly long time between data collection, producing and publishing a poverty estimate, and sharing the data with organizations such as the World Bank for use in international poverty comparisons.

As a result of these issues, measuring monetary poverty in MENA is complicated, at the country and at the regional level. Inability to measure poverty and other social-economic characteristics on a regular basis negatively affects national decision makers and hinders the ability to track progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Outdated surveys result in outdated consumption distributions, leading to inaccurate poverty monitoring and the exclusion of countries from global and regional poverty counts.

The priority for filling data gaps to measure well-being in MENA should be (i) improving access to existing HBSs and, (ii) a more regular collection of HBS data. International organizations, including the World Bank, can play a supportive role by providing technical assistance (TA) and sharing expertise in data collection, poverty measurement methods, microdata anonymization, and data sharing practices. International organizations can also provide funding or co-finance microdata collection in countries with limited resources.

If data collection is not possible, one can turn to data imputation techniques to obtain poverty estimates. This approach requires at least one up-to-date consumption survey and a non-consumption survey that collects similar individual and household socio-economic characteristics. This approach should be tested in MENA countries with established regular collection of labor force surveys (LFSs). The ongoing COVID19 pandemic can create a structural break in consumption series and may limit the possibility of imputation, calling for collection of new household budget surveys when lockdown is over.

If collection of new HBSs is not possible, and imputation is not feasible either, measuring non-monetary indicators of well-being using non-traditional surveys can be considered. For example, multidimensional poverty indexes (MPIs) can be used to track non-monetary dimensions of poverty. However, constructing MPIs is data intensive and requires information on each deprivation for all households. Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are often used for this purpose, but there are few countries in MENA where these surveys are more up to date than HBS surveys.

High phone penetration in MENA offers another alternative. Phone surveys can be valuable in conflict settings or other situations (COVID-19) when face-to-face data collection is not possible, and where the population has experienced large and sudden shocks and rapid information is needed. A key drawback of 27