4.3
Challenges of Poverty and Inequality in the Arab World
Despite spectacular economic rise of some of the Arab Gulf countries, poverty remains a persistent challenge in the Arab World. Social inequalities persist as new inequalities overlay old structured ones in a number of Arab countries. Depending on the entitlements patterns and the provision of the social safety net, social inequality is often deepened by the rapid social transformations. Historically formed structured inequality often combines with new poverty to produce social turmoil. Social inequality and poverty played a critical role in the waves of social uprisings popularly known as the “Arab Springs”. There are intra and inter-regional variations in poverty in the region which help shape not only internal political outcomes, it also impacts external relationships. Some of the poor countries in the region depend on their rich neighbors to meet ends meet, while others look beyond the region for facing the challenges of entitlements. Such external relations play an important role in shaping the geo-political alignments in the region. Intra-Arab regional migration too plays an important role. Remittance earnings play a critical role in meeting the challenges of poverty in some of the countries. However, social upheavals tend to disrupt patterned migration with far reaching consequences in the intra-Arab world relationships. The paper will provide a critical survey of the state of the play of poverty and inequality in the Arab world and try to chart various social and political implications of structured inequality and poverty in the region.