Publication: The Welfare of Syrian Households after a Decade of Conflict
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2024-05-30
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2024-05-30
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Over the past decade, violent conflict has dramatically increased globally. By 2030, it is estimated that countries affected by fragility, conflict and violence will be home to up to two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor. The consequences of conflict on a country’s development are profound, affecting a wide range of outcomes both directly and indirectly. Several studies have shown how conflict affects a country’s growth, exacerbates poverty and hunger, and disrupts service delivery, ultimately leading to a deterioration of health and education outcomes. Assessing the impact of conflict is often hindered by data constraints. Information on the profile and welfare of populations in fragile and conflict-affected countries is severely constrained by data availability, as is the understanding of the immediate and long-term welfare consequences of conflict. The report aims to provide an assessment of some of the welfare consequences of the conflict in Syria. To the extent possible, given existing data limitations, the analysis presented in this report tries to highlight changes in selected welfare outcomes between the pre-conflict period (2000–10), and the summer of 2022, when the latest nationally representative survey was conducted under the Humanitarian Needs Assessment Programme (HNAP).1 The analysis presented in this report further highlights the important role that humanitarian agencies play not only in providing vital assistance to populations in emergency situations, but also in collecting data in challenging environments. Beside informing humanitarian operations, data collected by humanitarian actors can effectively be used to generate knowledge public goods along the humanitarian-development nexus. This report is structured as follows: Section 1 provides an overview of the Syrian conflict, aimed at providing the background context for the analysis presented in Sections 2, 3, and 4, which assess the impact of conflict on the demographic profile of the Syrian population, and on its labor market and human capital outcomes. Section 5 provides an assessment and profile of Syrian population welfare, both in terms of monetary poverty and non-monetary (multidimensional) outcomes, while Section 6 builds on the findings of the report to provide concluding remarks.
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“World Bank. 2024. The Welfare of Syrian Households after a Decade of Conflict. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41627 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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