# Introduction

**More than a decade of conflict has had devastating socio-economic consequences for the Syrian Arab Republic** . In 2011 Syria was a fast-growing middle-income country. Fast forward 10 years, Syria is a lowincome country still engulfed in violence and struggling with a deep economic crisis. Conflict has claimed the lives of at least 350,209 individuals<sup>1</sup> and more than half of Syria’s pre-conflict population remains displaced, including 6.6 million IDPs in Syria and 6.2 million Syrian refugees displaced abroad. Between 2011 and 2019, the Syrian economy is estimated to have contracted by more than 50 percent in real terms. Over the same period, extreme poverty is projected to have increased manyfold, reflecting deterioration of livelihood opportunities and progressive depletion of household coping capacity.<sup>2</sup>

**Over the last four years, the negative welfare impact of conflict has been further exacerbated by regional and global shocks** .  The conflict in Syria has exacerbated the country’s vulnerability to external shocks. The intensification of US sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran after the collapse of the Nuclear Treaty in November 2018 impacted Syrian imports of Iranian fuel, leading to petrol and gas shortages which sparked sharp price increases for both food and non-food items in early 2019. Moreover, the financial crisis in Lebanon by end 2019 had ripple effects on the Syrian economy, further contributing to soaring prices.<sup>3</sup> The COVID-19 crisis and drought conditions in the Northeastern region, Syria’s traditional breadbasket which is still heavily affected by conflict and new waves of population displacement, further contributed to the food security challenge of the Syrian population. As of February 2022, before the war in Ukraine, WFP estimates that 12 million people, about 55 percent of the Syrian population, were facing acute food insecurity, up 51 percent compared to 2019.

**Household welfare analysis in Syria is severely constrained by data availability** . Similar to other conflictaffected countries, estimates of the living standards of the Syrian population are outdated due to the lack of official and comparable household budget surveys after the onset of war. The latest official household budget survey data available on the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP)<sup>4</sup> dates back to 2003, despite the existence of two more recent budget surveys conducted by Syria’s Statistical Office in 2007 and 2009.<sup>5</sup> As such, the World Bank has not been publishing poverty estimates for Syria post 2003.

> 1 Estimates of the total death toll of the Syrian war vary depending on the methodology and reporting agency. In 2021, the UN’s human rights office (OHCHR) released a tally of <u>350,200 deaths</u> including both civilians and combatants. The count is based on a strict methodology requiring the deceased’s full name, date of death and location of the body and should therefore be interpreted as an under-estimation of the actual number of war-related deaths.  The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimates an overall death toll of 610,000 people over 11 years of conflict, of which 160,681 are represented by civilians (120,158 men, 15,237 women and 25,286 children).

> 2 <u>ESCWA (2020) “Syria at war: eight years on”, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Beirut, 2020.</u>

> 3 Syrians, especially traders, have been depending on banks in Lebanon for accessing foreign currency (dollars). However, due to the financial crisis in Lebanon and with Lebanese banks limiting the release of funds, many Syrians have lost access to their savings. The heavily reduced release of cash from Lebanese banks has meant that dollars have become scarce in Syria, pushingup the informal market exchange rate. As a result, prices of food and non-food items have risen across Syria.

> 4 The Poverty and Inequality Platform <mark>(PIP) i</mark> s a publicly available dataset of World Bank’s official country-level, regional, and global estimates of poverty. Most of the data in PIP comes from the Global Monitoring Database, which is the World Bank’s repository of harmonized multitopic income and expenditure household surveys used to monitor global poverty. PIP contains more than 2,000 surveys from 168 countries covering 98% of the world’s population. The data available in PIP are standardized as far as possible but differences exist with regards to the method of data collection, and whether the welfare aggregate is based on income or consumption.

5 These surveys were used by UNDP and ESCWA to estimate national poverty estimates (see Abu-Ismail, Abdel-Ghadir and ElLaithy (2011) “Poverty and Inequality in Syria 1997-2007”, Arab Development Challenges Report, Background paper 2011/05).