five women of working age participate in the labor market. International standards for measuring poverty and socioeconomic indicators were adopted after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The implementation of a new LSMS began in 2007, the IHSES. We use the second round of this survey, which was carried out in 2012 to obtain official statistics on poverty, food security, income, labor market outcomes, health, and education. The survey is the basis for information on the household consumption component in the national accounts and for consumer price indices. The IHSES collects a more detailed labor and income module than the norm (relative to, for instance, countries where the LSMS is complemented by a Labor Force Survey) and has special modules to fill critical data gaps (such as anthropometrics and time use).

IHSES 2012 had an intended sample size of 25,488 households and a final sample of 24,750 households. The population was stratified in 119 districts ( _qadahs_ ). Within each district, 24 census enumeration areas (EAs) were randomly selected, and 9 households were sampled within each EA. Teams of interviewers were responsible for fieldwork in two districts distributed over one year. In each month, interviews were conducted by each team in four randomly selected EAs, two from each of the assigned districts. It follows that, by design, households in one EA had an equal probability of being interviewed in any of the survey months.<sup>7</sup>

# **3.2 Food Measurements**

A 7-day diary of the standard acquisition type was used in all interviews, with one respondent (the head of household or the most informed person) recording acquisitions on behalf of the household. The completion of the diary was assisted by enumerators, who visited households on alternate days to check the quality of entries, clarify any questions, and enter recorded data into computers. Instructions emphasized that households should record daily acquisitions of food and non-food commodities and meals away from home starting from the day after the first visit. Qualitative analyses confirmed a high level of enumerator effort expended to ensure that diary entries were correctly and regularly recorded.

One-third of households within each EA were also administered a recall module on food consumption during the first visit. Specifically, _two_ (diary and recall) measurements are available for household 3, 6 and 9 in each EA, while _one_ (diary) measurement is available for all remaining households. The availability of repeated measurements and the scale of the experiment mark a departure from past research on consumption measurement in developing economies. The recall module asked the market value of the quantities consumed by the household in the 7 days prior to the enumerator’s visit. A list of expenditure groups was selected based on an assessment of their importance in IHSES 2007 diaries. Fieldwork and resource constraints meant that this list was consolidated to include 20 such groups of aggregated food items (we list these groups in Appendix Figure A.2).<sup>8</sup>

> 7One of the important rationales for year-long surveys is the ability to capture seasonality in consumption and livelihoods. Seasonality in consumption is experienced due to differences in the availability of food items and, importantly, due to the month-long observations of Ramadan, and two Eid holidays. To ease fieldwork, a team would visit the 2 EAs from one of the districts in wave 1 (days 1 to 14 of the month) and the 2 EAs from the other district in wave 2 (days 15 to 29) of the month. Moreover, within each wave, the teams alternated the EA visited each day.

> 8The scale of IHSES precluded the use of individual diaries, which is deemed the most reliable instrument in Beegle et al. (2012). Our experiment is interesting because the cheaper option is randomized (recall questions) while the expensive option (diaries) remains the baseline for all households surveyed. Our recall module bears the closest resemblance to the subset list

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