Regional Ranking:
Regional Analysis: Middle East and North Africa
There are vast disparities across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in the 2011 Index. The most prosperous country in the region, the United Arab Emirates, places in the top 30; the least prosperous, Yemen, ranks close to the bottom, at 106th.
The Arab Spring has dominated the news, but behind the headlines, the region has experienced notable fluctuations in overall prosperity. The survey-based Index data were gathered at the end of 2010, in the months leading up to the uprisings, with the exception of Iran that was last surveyed in 2008. Most of the ‘hard’ statistics refer to data gathered at the end of 2009.
Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia have improved their overall performance, rising between eight and 10 places in the last two years. Yemen, Israel, and Morocco have declined by at least five places. Tunisia and Egypt, the countries where the Arab Spring began, have remained stable. And surprisingly, Syria has improved by five places.
Throughout the region, overall prosperity is driven down by persistently low scores on the Personal Freedom and (to a lesser extent) Governance sub-indices. For example, in Egypt, a moderately strong performance on the Education and Health sub-indices (ranked 68th and 65th, respectively), is offset by an extremely low score on the Personal Freedom sub-index (109th), placing Egypt in the bottom 30 on overall prosperity. A similar pattern can be observed in Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, and Iran.
The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have the highest Personal Freedom scores in the region. Notably, Gallup is not allowed to survey the large non- Arab, expatriate population, which is roughly 50% in the UAE and 20% in Kuwait. It is therefore hard to draw firm conclusions from the survey data in these two countries.