# 1. Introduction

Household budget surveys (HBSs) are commonly used to collect information about household expenditure, consumption, income, and other aspects of social development. National governments and international organizations use these multipurpose surveys to design public policies to improve socioeconomic well-being (Deaton, 2018) and to monitor progress in achieving many Sustainable Development Goals (Ferreira et al., 2016). Household budget surveys are also exclusively used by the World Bank to track the goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity.

Availability and access to household budget surveys along with regular reporting of monetary poverty are important components of the overall statistical capacity of a country. The Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) stands out for its low statistical capacity, lagging behind other regions in 2019 according to the statistical capacity indicator developed by the World Bank. According to Arezki et al. (2020), loss of data transparency and capacity has cost the MENA region about 7-14 percent in GDP per capita losses since 2005.

Although availability and access to household budget surveys has been improving in selected countries in the MENA region during the last decade, many challenges and data gaps remain (Serajuddin et al., 2015). For example, household budget surveys (HBSs) are not collected regularly in many countries and are often not comparable across years, limiting the ability to monitor development indicators. As it stands today, more than half of the countries in the region conducted two or fewer surveys between 2004 and 2018. This results in about 46 percent of MENA’s population living in data deprived countries.

Partially this is related to violent conflicts in some countries, including Iraq, Libya, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Republic of Yemen. Conflicts prevent any traditional data collection due to security issues. Moreover, conflicts may affect poverty quickly and make existing data outdated and unable to capture the changes. There are also many countries in the MENA region which do not collect HBSs regularly or do not share the microdata with the public. All these issues restrict the ability of governments, academics, and international organizations to monitor welfare in the region and to have informed policy discussions (Demombynes and Sandefur, 2014; Serajuddin et al., 2015).

To our knowledge, there are several papers looking into the issue of availability of household budget surveys. Demombynes and Sandefur (2014) explored the supply of household surveys during 1980-2010 and estimated the costs of filling remaining gaps. Serajuddin et al. (2015) analyzed data deprivations globally, focusing on HBSs and poverty estimates during 1990-2011. Both papers provided very useful overviews of HBS availability, but neither conducted a detailed review in the MENA region nor discussed options to fill the gap using different methods to measure poverty and well-being.

This paper fills the gap by focusing only on the MENA region<sup>2</sup> and explores in detail the availability, access and quality of the HBSs collected during last 15 years (2004-2018). The paper gives an overview of nontraditional methods of data collection in cases when collecting an HBS is not possible. It also offers a comprehensive list of potential options to estimate either monetary poverty or other indicators of wellbeing in the region. Survey-to-survey imputation, multidimensional poverty indexes (MPIs), phone

> 2 The MENA region includes here only 13 developing countries (Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, West Bank and Gaza and Yemen) and excludes rich Gulf countries.

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