Poverty, education and employment in the Arab-Bedouin society: A comparative view

Suleiman Abu-Bader () and Daniel Gottlieb ()

No 137, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: The socio-economic situation of the Arab-Bedouin population in the Negev is examined in light of the general Israeli Arab population. Based on the Galilee Society's social survey for 2004 Israeli Arab poverty incidence was found to be 52% with nearly two thirds in persistent poverty. Among Bedouins in villages unrecognized by the Israeli government it was nearly 80% with poverty severity about 7 times higher than that of the mainstream Jewish population in Israel, i.e. excluding the – predominantly poor – Jewish ultra-orthodox society. Poverty was calculated according to various definitions. Similarly to international evidence, we found that education, age, family size, employment and occupation of the household head and the number of income earners in the family are important determinants of the probability to be poor. Arab women's student enrollment rates over different generations improved considerably, reducing the education-gap compared to Arab men. Bedouin households, especially in non-recognized villages, were found to have much less access to infrastructure compared to other Arabs, thus forming a significant barrier to women’s participation in the labor force. This also had an adverse indirect effect toward the completion of schooling, thus keeping mothers’ fertility relatively high and reducing education's potentially diminishing effect on poverty. A considerable mismatch between skills and employment was found among Arab academics, thus hinting at discrimination and segregation in their labor market. Considering the various mentioned transmission mechanisms it seems that government intervention in infrastructure may yield a high social return and help interrupt the vicious circle of poverty.

Keywords: Bedouin; Ethnic groups; Israel; poverty; basic needs; relative poverty; food-energy-intake; infrastructure; fertility; education; school-dropout; employment. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 I21 I32 J13 O12 O15 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cwa, nep-hap and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2009-137.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2009-137

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).