The lack of employment with the massive reduction in labor income reinforced by the loss of assets and services of a proper dwelling implies a significant increase in the incidence of poverty among the IDPs. Simulation results show that the headcount rate would have grown by 15 percentage points from 23% up to 38% which is twice the impact for the population as whole (Figure 7). In other words, 4 out of 10 internal displaced individuals would have become poor as consequence of the crises. Additionally, the poverty gap and severity would also increase by 5 and 3 percentage points for this population.

Overall, IDPs alone account for half a million of the additional poor people as a consequence of the twin crises (Figure 8). This represents almost 20% of the increase in the total number of poor (i.e. 2.8 million poor). However, the IDP poverty incidence crisis varies significantly across regions. While in Kurdistan IDP would have been contributed to 62% of the growth in the number of poor, in the South this population only would contribute 2%.

Having said this, not all IDP would have become poor as consequence of the twin crises. Poor IDPs only comprise 6% of the total number of 8 million poor people in the crisis scenario and only a third of them would have experienced a worsening of their welfare status large enough to have fallen into poverty as consequence of the crises.

# **IV. Validation**

An important limitation that applies to all ex‐ante approaches is related to the validation of assumptions and hypothesis. The only test of the simulation model proposed in this paper is to combine ex‐ante and ex‐post analysis (see Bourguignon and Ferreira 2003). Fortunately, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and Kurdistan Region Statistics Office (KRSO) have collected a continuous Income Household and Expenditure Survey (C‐IHSES) during 2014.

The objective of this survey was to provide a more frequent estimate of poverty and welfare in Iraq in the years in between the full‐blown IHSES surveys (2007, 2012, and planned 2017/18). It was designed to be representative at the governorate level, with the intention that each wave would be nationally representative, with an intended sample size of 13,834 households, drawn equally from each of the 18 governorates.

However, the fieldwork was affected by the security situation in some governorates as a consequence of the influence of the Islamic State (IS) into Iraq’s northern and western provinces beginning June 2014. As a result, there are two groups of governorates in the final sample of the C‐IHSES: those where data collection was successfully completed and those where it could not be completed. Moreover, due to the evolving security situation, even in the first group of governorates where the intended sample was visited, the distribution of visits to certain primary sampling units was delayed or preponed.

In the first group, 13 out of 18 governorates were continuously surveyed over the entire period and the regions covered are the following: Kurdistan (i.e Duhok, Sulaimaniya and Erbil); part of Centre (Diyala, Babylon, Kerbela, Wasit and Najaf) and South (i. e. Qadisiya, Muthanna, Thi‐Qar, Maysan and Basrah).

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