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Assessing Refugee Poverty Using Capabilities Versus Commodities: The Case Of Afghans In Iran, Mitra Naseh, Miriam Potocky, Shanna L. Burke, Paul H. Stuart

School of Social Work

This study is among the first to calculate poverty among one of the world’s largest refugee populations, Afghans in Iran. More importantly, it is one of the first to use capability and monetary approaches to provide a comprehensive perspective on Afghan refugees’ poverty. We estimated poverty using data collected from a sample of 2,034 refugee households in 2011 in Iran. We utilized basic needs poverty lines and the World Bank’s absolute international poverty line for our monetary poverty analyses and the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for our capability analyses of poverty. Findings show that nearly half of the Afghan …