Ulaanbaatar
Mongolia’s poverty rate for 2018 estimated at 28.4 percent
Economy
Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ The National Statistics Office (NSO)
of Mongolia and the World Bank on June 21 presented their joint poverty rate
estimations for 2018. 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 was estimated at 7.2 percent, a
decrease by 0.5 percentage point from 2016. Poverty severity 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.
In 2018, the monthly average consumption per capita was MNT
279,912, 3.9 percent higher than the price-adjusted real consumption per capita
of MNT 269,328 in 2016. The growth of monthly per capita consumption during the
period of 2016 to 2018 was higher in rural areas (5.4 percent) than in urban
areas (3.7 percent).
The forthcoming poverty report with an in-depth socio-economic analysis of the 2018 living conditions in Mongolia will be released this fall.
Source: The World Bank
