By Jad Chaaban. While the Middle East is experiencing its best economic performance in three decades, the region also finds itself endowed with an unprecedented “youth bulge.” With 65% of its population under the age of 29 and the highest proportion of youth to adults in the region’s history, the “youth bulge” offers a vast pool of human capital that will need to be tapped in order to sustain economic growth.
However, many youth are currently excluded from playing productive roles in the region’s economic markets. The difficulties youth face include finding meaningful employment and affordable housing, accessing formal credit, and marrying and forming a family. This results in a debilitating state of dependency for the most potentially productive segment of the population. As a result, the region sacrifices billions of dollars to lost wages and weakened productivity.

In “The Costs of Youth Exclusion in the Middle East,” Jad Chaaban, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the American University of Beirut and former World Bank economist, quantifies the economic costs incurred by Middle Eastern societies specifically due to youth unemployment and joblessness, school dropouts, adolescent pregnancy and youth migration. The analysis contains country-specific estimates and pioneers a new methodology to obtain region-wide estimates of the costs of youth exclusion.