where _n_ is the number of refugees and _p_ is the number of refugees that are _not_ self-reliant ( _n = p + q_ ). When equals zero (poverty incidence) it holds that FGT0 + S = 1: the fraction of poor refugees plus the fraction of self-reliant refugees equals one as a refugee is either poor, or self-reliant. Note that there are αα at least two critical differences with traditional poverty measurement. First, self-reliance is derived from earned _income_ , whereas poverty is typically, but not always, measured through _consumption_ . Being able to sustain oneself through self-earned income is critical to a dignified life, with an inability to do so linked to "psychological harm, loss of work, skill and self-confidence, increase in ailments and morbidity, disruption of family relations and social life, hardening of social exclusion, and accentuation of racial tensions and gender asymmetries" (Sen 1999, p.94). This is not to state that all work is good, as there exist tyrannical forms of work that are major sources of deprivation. Yet as self-earned income is essential to self-reliance, and with this caveat in mind, a refugee is classified as self-reliant when their self-earned income exceeds the poverty line; while a refugee is considered non-poor when their consumption exceeds the poverty line. As such, a refugee who does not work and who is sustained by humanitarian assistance cannot be self-reliant. While a refugee is self-reliant if their earned income exceeds the poverty line, but may be classified as poor if the consumption from this income is less than the poverty line. This occurs, for instance, if part of the income is saved or invested.<sup>3</sup> Second, the emphasis in this paper’s measure of self-reliance is on _self_ -earned income. Gifts and humanitarian assistance are a source of income but are not self-earned. The same holds for income from remittances. Poverty measurements, by contrast, include consumption derived from gifts, or items purchased from remittances or on credit.

Provided only refugee self-earned income is considered, FGT1, also known as the poverty gap, can be interpreted as the ‘self-reliance gap’, which measures by how much, expressed as a fraction of the poverty line, refugee incomes would have to rise to make all refugees self-reliant.

Measuring income precisely through household surveys is notoriously difficult (Deaton 1997; Carletto 2022), particularly in low- and middle-income countries where much of refugee income is earned informally or through self-employment in, for instance, agriculture, services or trade. Despite this, income measures are the only ones that are available in some countries, most notably those in Latin America, where there is a tradition of using income approaches for measuring poverty. However, in most instances in this paper, a different approach is pursued, in which refugee earned income is approximated by deducting humanitarian assistance from refugee consumption. For the latter to proxy income, one needs to assume that refugee (net) savings and borrowing are negligible, while remittances are considered part of self-earned income.

The measurement of income and consumption of refugees using surveys is an evolving field, and microdata sets are becoming increasingly available. For this paper, 11 microdata sets were brought together. To our knowledge, these 11 datasets present the universe of microdata available for low- and middle-income countries suited for estimating refugee poverty and income. Nine of these datasets also permit the estimation of poverty and income among host communities, with this data not available for Jordan and Bangladesh only. In a subset of economies (Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, the West Bank and Gaza, Uganda) the data can be broken down into refugees living in camps and those living elsewhere, which further enriches the analysis.

> 3 When income is invested in an asset that will last for multiple periods, only the use value of the asset is included in the consumption aggregate.

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