A new UN report on development in the Arab world has shown that one in five residents of Arab nations live on less than $2 per day.
The Arab Human Development Report, issued by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), noted a high economic vulnerability among Arab states which has taken a toll on the overall human security of the area.
The report claimed that 20% of the Arab population in the Middle East lives on less than two dollars a day and outlined a number of negative economic trends throughout the Middle East.
The UNDP study found that Arab countries had volatile economies across the board, held hostage by a severe dependence on oil and, consequently, its wavering financial trends.
“Oil-led growth has created weak structural foundations in Arab economies,” the 2009 Arab Human Development Report read. “Many Arab countries are turning into increasingly import oriented and service based economies.”
“The types of services … contribute little to local knowledge development and lock countries into inferior positions in global markets,” it continued. “This trend has grown at the expense of Arab agriculture, manufacturing and industrial production.”
The unemployment rate in the Arab world is more than double that of the rest of the world, according to data compiled by the Arab Labor Organization, which contributed to the report.
UN officials, however, said a challenge in implementing policy to reverse such trends was sharp differences between states within the Middle East and North Africa.
“One of the main problems when you analyze the situation in the region is that it is addressed as being a region with the same patterns and trends, which is not true,” Adib Nehmeh, Policy Advisor for Poverty Reduction at the UNDP, told The Media Line. “When we address the Arab states as being one region it is totally, totally misleading.”
Nehmeh noted the report’s failure to indicate the factors which contribute to poverty.
“If you take the case of Iraq, Sudan, Palestine, and Somalia, you will see that poverty is mainly linked to the occupation, war, or the economic crises which began fifty or sixty years ago,” he said.
“If you go to the middle-income countries with diversified economies, you will see that the main factor for poverty is a combination of internal and external issues of a socio-economic nature,” Nehmeh explained. “It is mainly related to macroeconomic and social policy decisions.”
“In most chapters, the report did not gauge by sub-regional levels, which is wrong.”
Nehmeh explained that because of the broad way the data is presented in the Arab Human Development Report, it is useless for making concrete policy changes to alleviate poverty in the region.
“I believe that if you want to make policy recommendations, we cannot just look at regional averages of the twenty-two countries,” he said.
“I don’t think that programs trying to alleviate poverty will refer to this report. It is just a report.”