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Poverty in the Arab region garners little international attention because poverty rates there are far lower than in other regions like South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. However, high aggregate wealth hides significant pockets of hardship. The least-developed countries in the Arab region witnessed large increases in the proportion of their populations living below the poverty line in the last decade and some, like Yemen and Sudan, are among the poorest in the world. As a whole, the region has seen little decrease in absolute poverty measures since the early 1990s. Moreover, it had one of the lowest per capita GDP growth rates in the 1990s and early part of this decade, which translated into slow progress in human development compared to other developing countries.

Many governments in the Arab region have outlined strategic plans and earmarked financial resources for achieving significant poverty-reduction goals. Governments can use a diverse set of interventions to achieve these objectives, including regulations, taxes, and trade, monetary, and spending policies.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Arab Planning Institute (API) collaborated on this book, Public Policy and Poverty Reduction in the Arab Countries, in an effort to provide policymakers in the region with empirical analyses of the effects of public policy on poverty reduction in their countries. This book focuses specifically on public spending, which is a concrete demonstration of societal goals and public policy commitments. Governments can use public spending to achieve both economic growth and equity—the two components of poverty reduction—but the ideal investment strategy to maximize these goals will be country-specific.

The collaboration between IFPRI and API is an example of best practice in partnership and networking. During the past decade, IFPRI has conducted a number of studies examining public spending and its impact on growth and poverty reduction in many countries and regions. These studies have been valuable to developing country policymakers, often pushing them to rethink their priorities in allocating public resources. However, the relationship between public investment and poverty in the Arab countries had not been examined.

Fortunately, API has been studying poverty in the Arab countries since 2000, aiming to establish the basic facts on the spread, depth, and severity of poverty in the Arab countries. The Institute also conducts training courses on development management, including issues related to poverty and its correlates, for mid-level Arab planners and economic managers and provides consultancy services to Arab governments. Through these activities, API has a unique advantage in communicating research results to Arab policymakers.

The fruit of this collaboration is the current volume of studies on public policy and poverty in the Arab countries, which includes five country case studies and three regional background papers. We believe that the results reported in the volume will be useful to policymakers and researchers in the region, as well as to those in developing countries more broadly. While we recognize that more work remains to be done to understand the impact of public spending on poverty alleviation in the Arab region, we sincerely believe that our collaboration has established a launching pad for future work on the subject.

This book is available to downlad in PDF format by chapter or as single document.

• Full Text
  (PDF 1.9M)

• Table of Contents, Contributors, Foreword, and Acknowledgements
  (PDF 129K)
• Chapter One: Introduction
  Ali Abdel Gadir Ali and Shenggen Fan
  (PDF 149K)
• Chapter Two: Poverty in the Arab Region: A Selective Review
  Ali Abdel Gadir Ali
  (PDF 256K)
• Chapter Three: Impact of Public Policies on Poverty, Income Distribution and Growth
  Belkacem Laabas and Imed Limam
  (PDF 274K)
• Chapter Four: Impacts of Public Policy on Poverty in Arab Countries: Review of the CGE Literature
  Mustafa Babiker
  (PDF 264K)
• Chapter Five: Public Spending, Growth, and Poverty Reduction in Egypt: A Multi-level Analysis
  Shenggen Fan, Perrihan Al-Riffai, Moataz El-Said, Bingxin Yu, and Ahmed Kamaly
  (PDF 360K)
• Chapter Six: Public Expenditure, Economic Growth and Poverty in Morocco: Moving Towards a Multi-Levels Analysis
  Touhami Abdelkhalek and Marc Rockmore
  (PDF 327K)
• Chapter Seven: Public Policy and Poverty Reduction in Sudan, 1971-2002
  Hatim Ameer Mahran
  (PDF 304K)
• Chapter Eight: Public Spending, Pro-poor Growth and Poverty Reduction in Tunisia: A Multi-level Analysis
  Sami Bibi and Rim Chatti
  (PDF 469K)
• Chapter Nine: Harnessing Public Spending for Poverty Reduction in Yemen
  Mohamed Abdelbasset Chemingui
  (PDF 313K)
• Chapter Ten: Public Policy and Poverty in the Arab Region: Major Findings and Lessons Learned
  Ali Abdel Gadir Ali, Leah Horowitz, and Shenggen Fan
  (PDF 145K)