A few years ago I wrote a piece about measuring poverty in the South Caucasus.

That paper ended with 2010, but I was talking about it with someone yesterday, so I did some quick 2012 updates.

As far as monthly household income in 2012, the distribution hasn’t changed much since that 2010 paper, but you can see that Armenians and Azerbaijanis are doing much better economically.

In the paper I argue that material deprivation is the best measure of economic wellbeing because it reflects household ability to buy consumer goods.

This is the 2009-2010 distribution of material deprivation:

And this is the 2012 update.

Armenia didn’t change much. Azerbaijan has less people at the poverty end of the scale, so that’s a positive change. Georgia had a bit of a change in more people in the enough for food category, but about the same in poorest category.

It is hard to see economic changes in such a short period of time – it would certainly be worthwhile to do some trend analysis here. Maybe next year!