Poverty measurement

Purpose - With increasing governmental revenue and budgets, their responsibility for community development and growth has increased. The first step to policy-making in order to attain the desired welfare levels is identify and measure the related indicators such as poverty in the best possible way. In Iran, most of conducted poverty surveys due to the lack of panel data cannot decompose households to transient and chronic poverty group. In this situation, the Synthetic panel data is a useful and new approach to estimates of poverty mobility in countries with only cross-sectional statistics. Therefore, based on this method we calculated the poverty dynamic of rural areas in Iran. Design/methodology/approach - The present study, initially calculates the absolute poverty line of rural areas in Iran in 2012, 2015 and 2016, and then calculates the status of mobility of poverty during those years based on Synthetic panel data approach. Finding- The results of the estimation of probability functions for studying poverty dynamics indicated that in rural areas of Iran there was a kind of state dependence in poverty. According to the results, there is a dependency state in the rural poverty situation, where more than 86% of the households who were poor in 2016 were also poor (non-poor) during the first period (2012 or 2015) and only with the probability of less than 14% of the poor (non-poor) households during the past years was in the non-poor (poor) state.