Recession, Recovery and Poverty in Moldova

Following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, Moldova faced the deepest and most prolonged
recession among transition countries, and the resulting
increase in poverty has made it the poorest country in
Europe today. The main objective of this report is to update
and assess poverty in Moldova in its multiple dimensions,
with a view to informing public policies. It focuses on the
period of recession that followed the Russian crisis and the
subsequent recovery. It draws mainly on the Household Budget
Surveys, collected quarterly by the Department of Statistics
and Sociology, between 1997 and 2002, although the analysis
is supplemented as needed by information from other surveys
collected by Moldova's Department of Statistic s and
Sociology, from administrative data sources, from existing
qualitative studies, and from studies by local researchers
and other donor organizations. It should be noted that the
HBS is a population based survey. By providing detailed
information on the consumption of households, it permits an
analysis of income (consumption) based welfare. In addition,
by providing information on those who do not use public
services or programs, in addition to those who do, it
provides additional value to administrative data in the
analysis of non-income dimensions of poverty such as access
to health care or education. As such, the distribution of
users of public services such as health care services (for
example by rural and urban location) is likely to be
different from that obtained from administrative data
(typically based on information from facilities). Finally,
due to data limitations, the analysis focuses on the Right
Bank of Moldova.