| Sumario: | The last official household survey in Afghanistan showed that in 2020, close to half of the population of the country was living below the national poverty line. Since then, the country has experienced significant economic and social challenges following the change in political regime in 2021. This paper uses the latest developments in survey-to-survey imputations to estimate comparable poverty rates for Afghanistan. The analysis uses the latest household survey available and imputes poverty on the Afghanistan Welfare Monitoring Survey– a phone survey sampled from the same universe of individuals. Results show that 48.3 percent of the Afghan population was poor as of April-June 2023, a relative decline of 4 percentage points compared to the same months in 2020. The reduction in poverty was concentrated among rural households, with a decline from 51 to 44 percent, while it stagnated in urban areas at around 58 percent. The analysis accounts for seasonality in welfare patterns and implements several tests to validate the results. Trends in the evolution of self-reported welfare and food security make it reasonable to conclude that poverty first increased during the immediate economic contraction following the regime change, and then progressively stabilised.
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