Mongolia’s 2018 poverty rate estimated at 28.4% - World Bank

AKIPRESS.COM - The National Statistics Office (NSO) of Mongolia and the World Bank presented their joint poverty rate estimations for 2018, the World Bank said in press release.
The two organizations have collaborated on poverty assessments through the Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the Living Standard Measurement Survey since 2002.
This time the poverty rate was estimated jointly on the basis of the 2018 Household Socio-Economic Survey. According to these estimates, the national poverty rate in Mongolia stood at 28.4 percent in 2018 - a decrease of 1.2 percentage points from the 2016 estimate of 29.6 percent.
In 2018, the poverty gap-which measures the depth of poverty by estimating how far off households are from the poverty line-was estimated at 7.2 percent, a decrease by 0.5 percentage point from 2016. Poverty severity, which measures the degree of inequality among the poor by putting more weight on the position of the poorest, has decreased to 2.7 percent from 2.9 percent in 2016.
Poverty concentration is growing in urban areas. During the period between 2016 and 2018, the poverty rate declined by 4.1 percentage points in rural areas but increased by 0.1 percentage point in urban areas. While poverty rate remains high in rural areas, with two-thirds of the total population of Mongolia living in urban cities, poverty has become concentrated in urban areas. The share of the poor population in urban areas has increased from 62.1 percent in 2016 to 63.5 percent in 2018, and more than 40 percent of the poor lived in Ulaanbaatar in 2018.
Regional poverty estimates show the decline in poverty rate by 6.6 percentage points in Eastern region, 4.3 percentage points in Western region, 2.7 percentage points in Khangai region, and by 0.7 percentage points in Central region. However, in Ulaanbaatar city the poverty rate increased by 1.1 percentage points.