The Arab region is in trouble. Some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises have devastated societies, destroyed economies, and displaced millions of people, turning many of them into refugees. The continued marginalization of women and girls and inadequate investment in education and health services hold back social and human development. Water is scarcer than anywhere else in the world, jeopardizing food security and threatening urban and rural development, and climate change have ominous implications for the region, today and in the future. The Arab region is also the only region in the world in which extreme poverty has increased; inequality has also widened. It requires massive efforts and a paradigm shift to be put in track for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

To address these challenges, this rich and ambitious study argues that a bold new approach—based on comprehensive institutional, economic, and social reforms in the region—is needed that dismantles the barriers to good governance and leads to dynamic transformation. Transformative change requires more than just resources, according to the author; it requires a shift in orientation toward a new developmental policy framework in which institutional, political, social, and economic reforms are crafted and implemented simultaneously.

Abdelbary’s book is using advanced technical methods in assessing development opportunities and challenges in the Arab region, these tools outcomes were fascinating, especially the recommended framework that has been adequately analyzed in detail across the book. Moreover, the book has very strong policy implications useful for decision makers, which will make it a very useful tool for the assessment and monitoring of reforms.

This book fills a critical knowledge gap by presenting a new framework and examining the effects of three exogenous factors resource abundance, conflicts, and demographic change on development. It provokes thinking about alternative scenarios of reforms in the Arab world and raises fundamental questions about the region’s prospects. The framework developed in this book could be used to analyze other endogenous and exogenous factors and their impact on the Arab region such as climate change, pandemics, technological change, and the shifts in the center of the global economic gravity towards the east.