In addition to the magnitude and duration of low income status, attention should be paid to the extent to which poverty is recurrent (Fourage and Layte, 2005). The higher income mobility or volatility and the shorter the duration of poverty, the higher the proportion of people experiencing poverty at least once during the reported period, thus the higher the reported poverty rate will be. In the Republic of Moldova during 1997-2002, a decomposition of poverty into chronic and transient components revealed that poverty was mainly chronic, accounting for as much of 90% of the people classified as poor (Beegle, 2004). That is, despite transitions among households in terms of rank, a very large fraction of the poor in any year are likely to remain poor in the next period.