BAGHDAD, March 16 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi Ministry of Planning said on Tuesday that poverty rate in Iraq has reduced to 24.8 percent after a sharp increase in the country's poverty rate at the beginning of the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, the Iraqi official news agency reported.
A ministry's latest research, in cooperation with the World Bank, showed that the poverty rate in Iraq reached 24.8 percent of the population in the second half of 2020, down from 31.7 percent in the first half of the year due to the impacts of coronavirus pandemic, the ministry spokesman Abdul-Zahara al-Hindawi told the state-run al-Iraqiya channel.
The drop in the poverty rate is due to the government's decisions to reduce health restrictions, which led to the relative return of economic activities to normal, al-Hindawi said.
The overall security situation has been relatively improved in Iraq since the defeat of the Islamic State (IS) group late in 2017, although significant challenges remain, including political and security problems, economic instability, social unrest due to high rates of unemployment, eroded public services, and persistent low standards of living. Enditem
