Foreign Affairs - 11.2019 - 12.2019

The Middle East’s Lost Decades

November/December 2019 53

East and North Africa were not in

school, a regression to 2007 levels.

When one takes gender and wealth

inequality into account, conditions in

the region look even more dismal. Along

with the Palestinian territories, 11 Middle

Eastern countries—Algeria, Egypt, Iran,

Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi

Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—fall

into the worst-performing category on

the ™£’s Gender Development Index,

which measures the di
erence between

a country’s male and female score on

the ™£’s Human Development Index

( ̈²ž), a composite measure o‘ develop-

ment statistics.

The worst declines have been in

countries such as Syria and Yemen, which

have both experienced violent conÁicts

over the past decade. Syria dropped 27

places between 2012 and 2017 on the

̈²ž; Yemen dropped 20 places. Nearly

85 percent o‘ Syrians and 80 percent o‘

Yemenis now live in poverty. And in

2018, 10.5 million Syrians and 20 million

Yemenis were food insecure.

This stagnation or regression on key

development indicators is coupled with

sluggish economic growth. According to

the Economist Intelligence Unit,

economic growth in the Middle East

and North Africa has been steadily

declining following a drop in oil prices

between 2014 and 2016. The region

averaged 3.6 percent growth in 2015–16,

but that number fell to 1.6 percent in

2017 and 1.3 percent in 2018. This

stagnant growth has put a strain on

government Änances. Lebanon’s public

debt is now equal to more than 153

percent o‘ ³²Ÿ, the third-highest level

in the world. Even resource-rich

countries, such as Saudi Arabia, are

feeling the pinch. To reÄll state co
ers

often touted as a beacon o“ freedom in
the region, the government has begun
to crack down on freedom o‘ speech. In
2018, 38 people were prosecuted for
their online posts, four times the
number in 2017. Most o‘ these posts
criticized politicians, the president, or
the country’s security agencies. And
according to Freedom House, freedom
o‘ the press declined in 18 o‘ the
Middle East’s 21 countries between
2012 and 2017. This regional regression
is captured by the Economist Intelli-
gence Unit’s Democracy Index, which
shows that together the Middle East
and North Africa continue to make up
the lowest performing region in the
world on all measures o‘ democracy:
civil liberties, the electoral process and
pluralism, the functioning o‘ the
government, political culture, and
political participation.
As political freedoms have eroded,
so, too, have the development gains o‘
the past few decades. A 2018 global
report on multidimensional poverty by
the ™£²Ÿ and ¢Ÿ ̈ž found that nearly
one-Äfth o‘ the population o‘ the Arab
states, or 65 million people, lived in
extreme poverty, deÄned by the World
Bank as people earning less than $1.9
per day. Another one-third was either
“poor” or “vulnerable.” In fact, the Arab
region was the only region in the world
to experience an increase in extreme
poverty between 2013 and 2015, with
the rate rising from around four percent
to 6.7 percent. In Egypt, recent data
indicate that the poverty rate has risen
from 28 percent in 2015 to 33 percent
today, largely as a result o‘ austerity
measures and the devaluation o‘ the
Egyptian pound in 2016. In 2016, more
than 15 million children in the Middle