Population Literacy Skills in Arab Countries Essay

For the tables and the analysis, I chose the two years that were closer together, 2005 and 2009. I made this choice because a lot of rather significant changes happened in this short period. First of all, after 2005 the internet actively started to win its popularity all around the world and I wanted to demonstrate how this tendency developed in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Besides, everyone still remembers the major financial crisis that affected countries all around the world in 2007 and 2008. This way, my other intention was to examine the impact it created on the countries under analysis.

Middle Eastern region is known for its rapid economic and social development that skyrocketed after the 1990s. The majority of the countries of this area managed to develop profitable trading relationships with Asia, Europe and the United States. Besides, many of the Middle Eastern states are focused on the development of tourism and the attraction of great numbers of visitors. Due to this, these countries have been involved into a lengthy and thorough improvement and renovation process making themselves attractive, creating unique sights and building beautiful and luxurious resorts to open themselves to the inflow of new capitals.

Analysing the data I noticed several factors and changes that impressed me. One of them was the rapid growth of the population of Qatar which jumped from 821 thousand to over one and a half million people. It doubled within just 4 years. Most likely, this demographic change occurred due to the economical improvement of the country which attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from such countries as India and Pakistan who tried to benefit from the growing economy in the state.

One more noticeable change happened in Algeria. The country’s GDP growth per capita fell from 3.5 in 2005 to 0.6 in 2009. Besides, Algeria is the only one out of the five examined countries that showed a negative change in primary enrollment. While Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Morocco and Qatar improved their primary enrollment rates, Algeria’s numbers decreased by 3.7 %. Unfortunately, the data considering adult literacy in this country in 2009 was unavailable, though I would be interested to see how the primary enrollment rate affected that number. The drop in the growth of DGR per capita in the UAE was another noticeable factor. In my opinion, this can be explained by the impact of the financial crisis which affected the UAE a lot.

Finally, the most impressive growth can be noticed in the numbers of internet users in each of the countries. Even Algeria, which has the lowest number, demonstrates nearly 50% progress. The data for the UAE shows that in this area this state is superior to other countries in the list because its 2005 data equals that of the other countries registered in 2009.

Table 1. Data for 2005

Table 2. Data for 2009