Determinants of Vulnerability to Poverty in Afghanistan

Abstract

The present study is devoted to identify the factors and forces that are responsible for keeping some households in poverty whereas enables other to escape low level of living and poverty in the country. In fact, the information on the probable causes of poverty and vulnerability is crucial and a pre-requisite to design the most appropriate strategy for mitigating poverty and vulnerability of the households. Policies need to be initiated to overcome the potential causes of trapping people in poverty whereas initiatives also need to be undertaken to capacitate people to escape poverty or enable them to keep above the poverty threshold level. Such factors and forces are likely to be specific characteristics of the households themselves and specific attributes associated with the overall socio-economic environment where household happens to be located. In fact such environmental attributes tend to affect households differently through exchange entitlements of the household endowments in the market (Sen, 1971). Therefore, we propose to test the role of both household specific and its environmental related factors as potential determinants of household poverty and vulnerability in Afghanistan.