Poverty and vulnerability in Mozambique: An analysis of dynamics and correlates in light of the Covid-19 crisis using synthetic panels.

This study aims at providing new insights into poverty, vulnerability, and their correlates in Mozambique, applying synthetic panels techniques and expanding on earlier analyses. Our results suggest that there is a high degree of poverty immobility, especially in rural areas in the northern and central regions and for low-educated people. Even nonpoor households are at a high risk to vulnerability, and this risk does not differ much for households in urban/rural areas or in different regions or with different education levels. We also observe that a large portion of the population remains in or out of poverty over the entire year, with a higher percentage of individuals moving into poverty between the dry and the rainy seasons and a nonnegligible proportion of vulnerable people not managing to revert to nonpoverty in the subsequent dry season. Overall, these findings are highly relevant for designing anti-poverty policies and strategies, as they provide information on intra-year shocks and on some of the characteristics related to upward and downward mobility over longer time spans, also with regard to the recent Covid-19 and other recent shocks suffered by the country.