The survey is a key tool for monitoring living conditions, inequality and poverty, and for ensuring international comparability of statistics in the field.
The World Bank provides technical support to the NBS through the Poverty & Equity Global Practice. The main areas of cooperation since 2025 have focused on moving, along with monetary characteristics, to a multidimensional measurement of poverty. It involves not only monetary indicators of income, but also access to services, living conditions and other qualitative indicators.
Moldova, with the Bank’s support, participates in the International Comparison Program (ICP) of the 2024-2026 round to assess purchasing power parity and the level of economic development. The next stage in the development of comparability will be linked to strengthening institutional capacity to collect, process and analyze statistical data on income and living conditions in line with EU standards.
At the end of January, the NBS management held a meeting with representatives of the World Bank, specialists in the field of poverty reduction and equality in Europe and Central Asia, Ambar Narayan and Federica Marzo. During the meeting the issues of updating the existing methodology of absolute poverty measurement were discussed in order to bring it in line with the latest recommendations of the World Bank and the best international practices.
Joint work with the WB is aimed at more accurate identification of socially vulnerable population for targeted social assistance. According to the latest data, the absolute poverty rate in Moldova amounted to 33.6% (in rural areas it is much higher – 42.9%).
