IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/9003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Poverty, Vulnerability, and Household Coping Strategies during the 2015-16 Recession in Belarus

Author

Listed:
  • Bornukova,Kateryna
  • Cojocaru,Alexandru
  • Matytsin,Mikhail
  • Shymanovich,Gleb

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the recent recession in Belarus on poverty and broader measures of household welfare and compares the recent recession episode to previous economic crises in Belarus. The paper constructs a measure of vulnerability to poverty, based on an estimated probability of falling below the national poverty threshold not exceeding 10 percent, which is estimated for each year of the household survey data between 2014 and 2017. The analysis finds that the recession of 2014-16 was qualitatively different from earlier recent crisis episodes (2008-09 and 2010-11) in that it affected low-income households to a much greater extent, and the negative welfare effects lingered. The paper also documents that although the recession did not result in a substantial increase in absolute poverty by the official definition, it led to a considerable increase in the share of households that are vulnerable to poverty. The greater degree of vulnerability is also evident from the growing share of the population that faced a risk of poverty within a year (going in and out of poverty). Household types for which the impact of the recession was most pronounced are households with multiple children, single-parent households, residents of rural areas, as well as those who were not employed, partly employed, or low-skilled employees. Coping strategies that were employed by the population were largely related to reducing expenditures and, among vulnerable households, food expenditures in particular, as well as drawing down on their savings.

Suggested Citation

  • Bornukova,Kateryna & Cojocaru,Alexandru & Matytsin,Mikhail & Shymanovich,Gleb, 2019. "Poverty, Vulnerability, and Household Coping Strategies during the 2015-16 Recession in Belarus," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9003, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/465121568118662575/pdf/Poverty-Vulnerability-and-Household-Coping-Strategies-during-the-2015-16-Recession-in-Belarus.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9003. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.