Description:
Poverty reduction is an important goal
for governments of many developing countries. This goal is
synonymous with economic development and achieving a higher
quality of life for all population groups. Thus, monitoring
the dynamics of poverty and inequality is implicit in the
monitoring of progress in societal development. As the vast
literature shows, development progress to a large extent
depends on economic and social policies and economic growth.
Thus, identifying the relationship between relevant economic
variables and poverty and inequality indicators may provide
policy guidance on what has furthered the country's
progress. The report consists of two main parts. The first
part discusses poverty and inequality for 2009 and, thus,
from a static perceptive. So, the first section describes
and discusses the main features and correlates of the poor.
The goal is to provide a brief overview of poverty in the
Kyrgyz Republic and describe the characteristics of
households and the poor. This is achieved by considering the
poverty incidence among households and individuals
differentiated by such characteristics as age, household
size, employment status, educational attainment, geographic
location, gender of the household head, and internal
migration status of the household head. This section also
incorporates some insights on poverty from a recent study
carried out in the Kyrgyz Republic related to the poverty
and social impact analysis of selected reforms in the social
protection sector. The second section discusses the dynamics
of poverty and inequality in the Kyrgyz Republic during
2006-2009. This section relates the trends of macro
indicators gross domestic product, or GDP, growth in
different sectors of the economy, the consumer price index
[CPI], remittances, and social budget expenditures) to
changes in micro indicators of interest (poverty and
inequality). The objective is to integrate into one coherent
picture the recent macro and micro developments. The period
of 2006-2009 coincided with the food price volatility and
financial crisis of 2008-09. So the distinct feature of this
report is that the impact of international instabilities is
reflected in the assessment of poverty and inequality. The
report uses two types of data: the macroeconomic, national
accounts data as regularly reported by the National
Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic (NSC), Ministry
of Finance, and National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic, and
microeconomic, primary data derived from the Kyrgyz
Integrated Household Survey, or KIHS (also collected by the
NSC). These two might not always be consistent with each
other, but they do complement one another to provide useful
policy insights.