Key Findings Nine rounds of the Rural-Urban Food Security Survey (RUFSS) have been conducted between June 2020 and September 2021 to assess the impacts of Myanmar’s economic, political, and health crises on various dimensions of household welfare. RUFSS interviews about 2000 mothers of young children per round from urban Yangon, the rural Dry Zone, and recent migrants from these areas. Key Findings ▪ Myanmar has experienced four distinct economic shocks since early 2020. The most recent of these shocks–the spread of the Delta variant–was devastating, with 63 percent of respondents stating that at least one household member had experienced COVID-like symptoms and almost all cases occurring in the May-September 2021 third wave. ▪ 16 percent of interviewed households moved townships between their first interview and September 2021. Around two-thirds of these were from the Yangon sample. ▪ Physical insecurity has emerged as a key impact of political instability, with 53 percent of responde

Ten rounds of the Rural-Urban Food Security Survey (RUFSS) have been conducted between June 2020 and December 2021 to assess the impacts of Myanmar’s economic, political, and health crises on various dimensions of household welfare. RUFSS interviews about 2000 mothers of young children per round from urban Yangon, the rural Dry Zone, and recent migrants from these areas.

Six rounds of the Rural-Urban Food Security Survey (RUFSS) conducted in 2020 demonstrated the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on poverty and food insecurity among approximately 2,000 households with pregnant women or young children in urban Yangon and the rural Dry Zone. In this Research Note, we present results from a follow-up round conducted in May 2021.

Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar’s Dry Zone. Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 – median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences. These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.

This study assesses the welfare impacts of COVID-19 on households in Myanmar by combining recent high-frequency telephone survey evidence for two specific rural and urban geographies with national-level survey-based simulations designed to assess ex-ante impacts on poverty with differing amounts of targeted cash transfers. The first source of evidence – the COVID-19 Rural and Urban Food Security Survey (C19- RUFSS) – consists of four rounds of monthly data collected from a sample of over 2,000 households, all with young children or pregnant mothers, divided evenly between urban and peri-urban Yangon and the rural Dry Zone. This survey sheds light on household incomes prior to COVID-19 (January 2020), incomes and food security status soon after the first COVID-19 wave (June 2020), the gradual economic recovery thereafter (July and August 2020), and the start of the second COVID-19 wave in September and October 2020. This survey gives timely and high-quality evidence on the recent welfare impacts of COVID-19 for two important geographies and for households that are nutritionally highly vulnerable to shocks due to the presence of very young children or pregnant mothers. However, the relatively narrow geographic and demographic focus of this telephone survey and the need for forecasting the poverty impacts of COVID-19 into 2021 prompt us to explore simulationbased evidence derived by applying parameter shocks to household models developed from nationally representative household survey data collected prior to COVID-19, the 2015 Myanmar Poverty and Living Conditions Survey (MPLCS). By realistically simulating the kinds of disruptions imposed on Myanmar’s economy by both international forces, e.g., lower agricultural exports and workers’ remittances, and domestic COVID-19 prevention measures. e.g., stay-at-home orders and temporary business closures, we not only can predict the impacts of COVID-19 on household poverty at the rural, urban, and national levels, but also can assess the further benefits to household welfare of social protection in the form of monthly household cash transfers of different magnitudes. Combined, these two sources of evidence yield insights on both the on-the-ground impacts of COVID-19 in recent months and the potential poverty reduction impacts of social protection measures in the coming year. We conclude the study with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.

Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar's Dry Zone.Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 - median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences.These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.

The regional context in which rural livelihoods in Myanmar are embedded varies widely, in terms of physical geography, climate and agroecology, local resource base, agrarian structure, infrastructure provision, proximity to urban areas and neighboring countries, social networks, institutions, and ethnicities. The composition of livelihoods in each administrative and geographical zone of the country reflects these diverse contexts. Marked variations in patterns of livelihoods are evident at multiple scales, from the zone or region, down to township, and village level, so that the composition of livelihoods in villages close to one another sometimes varies widely (Phyo, 2022). Despite a high level of place-based specificity, many broad similarities and common trends also shape the composition of livelihoods at sub-national and national levels. These include: Generally low levels of agricultural productivity relative to other countries in the region, in terms of both land and labor (World Bank 2016); High rates of landlessness and legacies of land confiscation and unresolved struggles over land rights and access (Mark and Belton 2020); Generally poor, though -prior to 2020 - rapidly improving, public infrastructure and services, including electricity, roads, schools, health services, and rural credit (Belton et al. 2017; Lambrecht and Belton 2018); Relatively low levels of diversification and capital in the rural non-farm economy; High rates of international and domestic outmigration (World Bank and LIFT 2016; CHIME 2019); Histories of ethno-political conflict and insecurity (South 2009). This working paper synthesizes analyses from four large household surveys, each covering a major agro-ecological zone, to evaluate inter-regional variations in the composition of livelihoods and the rural economy. The four zones examined are the Delta (Ayeyarwady and Yangon), the Dry Zone (Mandalay, Magway, Sagaing), the hills (represented by Shan South), and the coasts (represented by Mon State). We also synthesize recent secondary sources that offer additional context and insights on regional livelihood dynamics from these and other areas of Myanmar, including the impacts of the ‘triple crisis’ (covid, coup, and price inflation) beginning in 2020.