ERBIL, Kurdistan Region--The poverty rate has hit yet another high level in Kurdistan Region by increasing more than four times since 2013, from 3 percent to 15 percent, the head of statistics department in Sulaimani told Rudaw on Wednesday.
Mahmud Othman said that poverty rate in Kurdistan Region is still relatively low compared to the rest of Iraq.
“When the level of poverty was 3 percent in Kurdistan Region[in 2013], it was 15 percent in Iraq, Othman said, “But now that it has reached fifteen percent in here, it is 30 percent in Iraq,”
He said the Kurdistan Region’s differences with centre and south of Iraq in this regard is surprisingly significant since public servants in Iraq receive their salaries on time, whereas in Kurdistan the public employees receive theirs often with significant delays, for months at times.
The poverty line index in Iraq and Kurdistan is 105,000 Iraqi dinars (around $80) per month, according to World Bank standards.
The KRG struggles to finance the monthly wages to some 1.4 million people on its payroll, with around 730,000 of them directly employed by the KRG, while another 700,000 people have monthly payments from the Kurdish government in pensions, social protection for the underprivileged, student stipends and payments to families of Peshmerga victims, among others.
The Kurdish Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani said in early December that in 2014 Kurdistan Region suffered from triple shocks: the Iraqi budget cut early that year, the war with ISIS that began that summer and the subsequent influx of refugees and IDPs (internally displaced people) who numbered almost two million, coupled later with "a devastating blow" of low oil prices.
Talabani said that as the result his government's unpopular austerity measures are expected to continue in 2017.
The head of Statistics Department of Kurdistan Region however questioned Othman’s estimates. He said there has not been recent statistics with regard to poverty rate in 2016.
“According to the latest survey, which we had conducted with the World bank, the poverty rate in Kurdistan was 12.5 percent in 2014, that number also includes the refugees and the IDPs.”
A United Nations report in August 2015 revealed that In less than one year, the poverty rate in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region more than doubled, increasing from 3.8 percent to 8.1 percent.
More than one in ten people in the Kurdistan Region live below the poverty line,data from the Region's Statistics Office revealed last September.
The extreme poverty is more widespread among larger families with many children and unemployed parents.
