Khaberni - Haider Freihat, the Director General of the Department of Statistics, said on Monday that the reason for the delay in announcing the figures for the poverty line and its rate in Jordan is due to "distortion of poverty data during the data collection period that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis," explaining that "the distortion of data prevented the adoption of the results," without clarifying what those results were at the time.
He added through "Al-Mamlaka" that the data analysis was invalid, because the consumption basket and the income and expenditure basket adopted by Jordanians during the COVID-19 pandemic were completely different from what is adopted at other times, which made the consumption basket distorted and not adopted.
He affirmed that the only solution was to conduct a new survey for the poverty line, stating that this survey will be implemented after the completion of the population census and will require a full year to conduct.
Freihat explained that data collection in late COVID-19 took about a full year in the field during the years 2021 or 2022 approximately, but the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic led to a change in the patterns of consumption and income, which invalidated the data for analysis.
The absolute poverty rate among Jordanians reached 15.7%, representing 1.069 million Jordanians, while the rate of hunger poverty (extreme) in Jordan was 0.12%, or about 7993 Jordanian individuals, according to the latest survey on household income and expenditure conducted by the Department of Statistics (2017-2018).
* Census of the Expatriates
In the same context, he indicated that the population census has reached the third stage out of four stages, expecting to finish this stage in the upcoming June, stating that the population of Jordan is about 12 million people, of which Jordanians constitute about 70% of them.
He pointed out that the latest population census was conducted in 2015, and since then the department has relied on annual population estimates and at the level of residential aggregations, explaining that with the actual count this year, and after 11 years since the last census, the new figure resulting from the actual count will be adopted and the estimation figures started after 2015 will be canceled.
Freihat noted that for the first time in the history of Jordan, the census will include a question to families about their children residing outside Jordan and identifying the countries they are in, with the aim of researching the number of Jordanians outside the kingdom.
