Economic Modernisation Vision: The Progress Is There — But Where Is the Impact?
More than three years after the launch of Jordan’s Economic Modernisation Vision, the most important question is no longer how many initiatives have been launched, how many projects have been completed, or how many laws and regulations have been amended. The question that deserves attention today is more direct: what has actually changed in the Jordanian economy? The Vision was not presented as an administrative programme, but as a project to move the economy toward higher levels of growth, investment, productivity, job creation, and living standards. From this perspective, the picture so far is mixed. There are clear achievements, and reforms and projects have indeed moved forward, yet their economic impact has not emerged strongly enough to provide full confidence in the path toward 2033. This is not an argument for diminishing what has been achieved, but for shifting the question from the scale of implementation to the scale of impact. Ultimately, the Vision will not be judged by the number of initiatives completed, but by the extent to which they change the economy and people’s lives.
Growth has improved, but it remains close to its traditional range, at around 3 percent, while the second phase of the Vision is expected to move the economy toward higher and more sustainable rates. This is the heart of the issue: the economy does not merely need to continue growing; it needs to change the speed of growth itself. Every year spent near traditional growth rates places a greater burden on the years that follow to make up for what was not achieved earlier. It is true that the economy has faced exceptional regional and global conditions, and its ability to preserve stability and positive growth in such an environment deserves recognition. But the Vision was designed precisely to create an economic transition beyond the usual trajectory. The question, therefore, is no longer whether the economy is moving, but whether it is moving fast enough to reach the Vision’s objectives within the time that remains. The problem is not that the economy is standing still; it is that the remaining time for the Vision may move faster than the economy unless results accelerate.
Exports, by contrast, provide one of the more encouraging signals of recent years. Their performance has improved noticeably, confirming that an important part of the Jordanian economy is capable of competing, reaching markets, and expanding abroad. This is an achievement worth building on rather than passing over quickly. At the same time, however, it raises an important question: why has the momentum in exports not been reflected with equal strength across other economic indicators? Part of the improvement may be concentrated in particular sectors, while new investments may require time before translating into broader production. Legislative and institutional reforms also tend to precede the response of the real economy. The next phase should therefore turn export success into a platform for expanding the productive base, linking exporters to broader domestic supply chains, and attracting new investment into sectors in which Jordan has genuine competitive potential. The objective should not simply be to export more, but to make exports a broader engine of growth, investment, and employment.
The labour market remains the test most closely connected to people’s daily lives. Although the economy is creating new jobs, unemployment among Jordanians remains close to 21 percent, a level too high to conclude that economic improvement is being felt broadly. This creates a paradox that deserves to sit at the centre of the discussion: how can new jobs be created while unemployment declines only slowly? Part of the answer lies in the growing number of new entrants to the labour market; another part lies in the mismatch between the skills of jobseekers and the jobs available, as well as the quality, wages, and geographic distribution of those jobs.
Employment policy therefore cannot remain separate from investment, education, and training policies. If investment flows into sectors that do not absorb jobseekers, or if the skills produced by the education system do not match the needs of emerging sectors, the economy may grow and create jobs without producing the required decline in unemployment.
Productivity is the link that connects growth, employment, and living standards. It is not enough simply for more people to work; each job must also become more capable of generating greater value and higher income. If worker and firm productivity remain limited, companies will have limited capacity to raise wages, expand, and compete, while the transition to higher growth will remain difficult. The question should therefore not stop at how many jobs have been created. It should extend to what kinds of jobs are being created, in which sectors, and how much value they add to the economy. A job created in a sector capable of innovation, expansion, and exports has a different economic impact from one in a sector with limited productivity and growth potential. Raising productivity is therefore essential to increasing incomes and turning aggregate economic growth into an improvement that citizens can actually feel.
Investment is the fuel without which this transformation will be difficult to achieve. Jordan’s economy cannot rely on public spending alone to finance the required leap, particularly given the country’s well-known fiscal constraints. The success of the next phase will therefore depend heavily on the state’s ability to attract private investment and turn major projects from plans and announcements into real economic activity. Here, too, it is important to distinguish between a project existing on paper and its impact existing in the economy. A project does not generate growth when it is announced; it does so when financing begins, work starts on the ground, supply chains develop, production commences, and jobs are created. The speed of implementation, removal of obstacles facing investors, consistency of procedures, and the ability of institutions to make timely decisions are therefore economic factors no less important than the size of the project itself.
This points to the need to develop the way the Vision is monitored. The early years were, by their nature, years of foundation-building: legislation, regulations, platforms, and projects at different stages of preparation and implementation. It was natural for a substantial share of the effort to focus on building the enablers the economy requires. But completing a procedure does not necessarily mean achieving an economic outcome. Monitoring should therefore gradually move from asking “How much have we completed?” to asking “What have we changed?” A project should be assessed by what it has added to growth, the investment it has stimulated, the sustainable jobs it has created, the expansion it has generated in production and exports, and the productivity gains it has delivered. Only then do completion rates acquire genuine economic meaning, and monitoring becomes a tool for identifying what works and accelerating it, while correcting what is underperforming, rather than merely recording completed initiatives.
For this reason, 2026 should not be treated as an ordinary year in the life of the Vision, but as a transition point between two phases. If the early years were largely devoted to building the necessary enablers, the years ahead must become the phase in which the economic return on those enablers becomes visible. What is needed now is not a new vision or additional headlines, but faster implementation of the projects with the greatest impact, removal of barriers to investment, closer alignment of education and training with labour-market needs, expansion of the productive and export base, and the placement of productivity at the centre of economic policy. Most importantly, priorities should shift from managing a long list of initiatives to focusing on the engines that can genuinely change the trajectory of growth and employment. The success of the next phase will depend more on the depth of impact than on the breadth of the project list.
A reading of the past few years does not justify pessimism, but neither does it allow complacency. Exports provide encouraging signals; growth is improving but needs to accelerate; jobs are being created but unemployment remains high; investment faces the test of moving from projects to production; and productivity remains the critical link. Protecting the Economic Modernisation Vision therefore does not mean defending everything that has been achieved, nor does it mean diminishing those achievements. It means examining the gap between implementation and impact before time becomes tighter. By 2033, the question will not be how many initiatives were completed or how many projects were announced, but whether Jordan has become a larger and more productive economy, with lower unemployment, higher incomes, and better opportunities. The direction established by the Vision can be built upon, but the next phase requires more than continued implementation; it requires faster impact. The challenge in the years ahead is no longer to prove that the Vision is being implemented, but to prove that implementation is changing the economy.
More than three years after the launch of Jordan’s Economic Modernisation Vision, the most important question is no longer how many initiatives have been launched, how many projects have been completed, or how many laws and regulations have been amended. The question that deserves attention today is more direct: what has actually changed in the Jordanian economy? The Vision was not presented as an administrative programme, but as a project to move the economy toward higher levels of growth, investment, productivity, job creation, and living standards. From this perspective, the picture so far is mixed. There are clear achievements, and reforms and projects have indeed moved forward, yet their economic impact has not emerged strongly enough to provide full confidence in the path toward 2033. This is not an argument for diminishing what has been achieved, but for shifting the question from the scale of implementation to the scale of impact. Ultimately, the Vision will not be judged by the number of initiatives completed, but by the extent to which they change the economy and people’s lives.
Growth has improved, but it remains close to its traditional range, at around 3 percent, while the second phase of the Vision is expected to move the economy toward higher and more sustainable rates. This is the heart of the issue: the economy does not merely need to continue growing; it needs to change the speed of growth itself. Every year spent near traditional growth rates places a greater burden on the years that follow to make up for what was not achieved earlier. It is true that the economy has faced exceptional regional and global conditions, and its ability to preserve stability and positive growth in such an environment deserves recognition. But the Vision was designed precisely to create an economic transition beyond the usual trajectory. The question, therefore, is no longer whether the economy is moving, but whether it is moving fast enough to reach the Vision’s objectives within the time that remains. The problem is not that the economy is standing still; it is that the remaining time for the Vision may move faster than the economy unless results accelerate.
Exports, by contrast, provide one of the more encouraging signals of recent years. Their performance has improved noticeably, confirming that an important part of the Jordanian economy is capable of competing, reaching markets, and expanding abroad. This is an achievement worth building on rather than passing over quickly. At the same time, however, it raises an important question: why has the momentum in exports not been reflected with equal strength across other economic indicators? Part of the improvement may be concentrated in particular sectors, while new investments may require time before translating into broader production. Legislative and institutional reforms also tend to precede the response of the real economy. The next phase should therefore turn export success into a platform for expanding the productive base, linking exporters to broader domestic supply chains, and attracting new investment into sectors in which Jordan has genuine competitive potential. The objective should not simply be to export more, but to make exports a broader engine of growth, investment, and employment.
The labour market remains the test most closely connected to people’s daily lives. Although the economy is creating new jobs, unemployment among Jordanians remains close to 21 percent, a level too high to conclude that economic improvement is being felt broadly. This creates a paradox that deserves to sit at the centre of the discussion: how can new jobs be created while unemployment declines only slowly? Part of the answer lies in the growing number of new entrants to the labour market; another part lies in the mismatch between the skills of jobseekers and the jobs available, as well as the quality, wages, and geographic distribution of those jobs.
Employment policy therefore cannot remain separate from investment, education, and training policies. If investment flows into sectors that do not absorb jobseekers, or if the skills produced by the education system do not match the needs of emerging sectors, the economy may grow and create jobs without producing the required decline in unemployment.
Productivity is the link that connects growth, employment, and living standards. It is not enough simply for more people to work; each job must also become more capable of generating greater value and higher income. If worker and firm productivity remain limited, companies will have limited capacity to raise wages, expand, and compete, while the transition to higher growth will remain difficult. The question should therefore not stop at how many jobs have been created. It should extend to what kinds of jobs are being created, in which sectors, and how much value they add to the economy. A job created in a sector capable of innovation, expansion, and exports has a different economic impact from one in a sector with limited productivity and growth potential. Raising productivity is therefore essential to increasing incomes and turning aggregate economic growth into an improvement that citizens can actually feel.
Investment is the fuel without which this transformation will be difficult to achieve. Jordan’s economy cannot rely on public spending alone to finance the required leap, particularly given the country’s well-known fiscal constraints. The success of the next phase will therefore depend heavily on the state’s ability to attract private investment and turn major projects from plans and announcements into real economic activity. Here, too, it is important to distinguish between a project existing on paper and its impact existing in the economy. A project does not generate growth when it is announced; it does so when financing begins, work starts on the ground, supply chains develop, production commences, and jobs are created. The speed of implementation, removal of obstacles facing investors, consistency of procedures, and the ability of institutions to make timely decisions are therefore economic factors no less important than the size of the project itself.
This points to the need to develop the way the Vision is monitored. The early years were, by their nature, years of foundation-building: legislation, regulations, platforms, and projects at different stages of preparation and implementation. It was natural for a substantial share of the effort to focus on building the enablers the economy requires. But completing a procedure does not necessarily mean achieving an economic outcome. Monitoring should therefore gradually move from asking “How much have we completed?” to asking “What have we changed?” A project should be assessed by what it has added to growth, the investment it has stimulated, the sustainable jobs it has created, the expansion it has generated in production and exports, and the productivity gains it has delivered. Only then do completion rates acquire genuine economic meaning, and monitoring becomes a tool for identifying what works and accelerating it, while correcting what is underperforming, rather than merely recording completed initiatives.
For this reason, 2026 should not be treated as an ordinary year in the life of the Vision, but as a transition point between two phases. If the early years were largely devoted to building the necessary enablers, the years ahead must become the phase in which the economic return on those enablers becomes visible. What is needed now is not a new vision or additional headlines, but faster implementation of the projects with the greatest impact, removal of barriers to investment, closer alignment of education and training with labour-market needs, expansion of the productive and export base, and the placement of productivity at the centre of economic policy. Most importantly, priorities should shift from managing a long list of initiatives to focusing on the engines that can genuinely change the trajectory of growth and employment. The success of the next phase will depend more on the depth of impact than on the breadth of the project list.
A reading of the past few years does not justify pessimism, but neither does it allow complacency. Exports provide encouraging signals; growth is improving but needs to accelerate; jobs are being created but unemployment remains high; investment faces the test of moving from projects to production; and productivity remains the critical link. Protecting the Economic Modernisation Vision therefore does not mean defending everything that has been achieved, nor does it mean diminishing those achievements. It means examining the gap between implementation and impact before time becomes tighter. By 2033, the question will not be how many initiatives were completed or how many projects were announced, but whether Jordan has become a larger and more productive economy, with lower unemployment, higher incomes, and better opportunities. The direction established by the Vision can be built upon, but the next phase requires more than continued implementation; it requires faster impact. The challenge in the years ahead is no longer to prove that the Vision is being implemented, but to prove that implementation is changing the economy.
More than three years after the launch of Jordan’s Economic Modernisation Vision, the most important question is no longer how many initiatives have been launched, how many projects have been completed, or how many laws and regulations have been amended. The question that deserves attention today is more direct: what has actually changed in the Jordanian economy? The Vision was not presented as an administrative programme, but as a project to move the economy toward higher levels of growth, investment, productivity, job creation, and living standards. From this perspective, the picture so far is mixed. There are clear achievements, and reforms and projects have indeed moved forward, yet their economic impact has not emerged strongly enough to provide full confidence in the path toward 2033. This is not an argument for diminishing what has been achieved, but for shifting the question from the scale of implementation to the scale of impact. Ultimately, the Vision will not be judged by the number of initiatives completed, but by the extent to which they change the economy and people’s lives.
Growth has improved, but it remains close to its traditional range, at around 3 percent, while the second phase of the Vision is expected to move the economy toward higher and more sustainable rates. This is the heart of the issue: the economy does not merely need to continue growing; it needs to change the speed of growth itself. Every year spent near traditional growth rates places a greater burden on the years that follow to make up for what was not achieved earlier. It is true that the economy has faced exceptional regional and global conditions, and its ability to preserve stability and positive growth in such an environment deserves recognition. But the Vision was designed precisely to create an economic transition beyond the usual trajectory. The question, therefore, is no longer whether the economy is moving, but whether it is moving fast enough to reach the Vision’s objectives within the time that remains. The problem is not that the economy is standing still; it is that the remaining time for the Vision may move faster than the economy unless results accelerate.
Exports, by contrast, provide one of the more encouraging signals of recent years. Their performance has improved noticeably, confirming that an important part of the Jordanian economy is capable of competing, reaching markets, and expanding abroad. This is an achievement worth building on rather than passing over quickly. At the same time, however, it raises an important question: why has the momentum in exports not been reflected with equal strength across other economic indicators? Part of the improvement may be concentrated in particular sectors, while new investments may require time before translating into broader production. Legislative and institutional reforms also tend to precede the response of the real economy. The next phase should therefore turn export success into a platform for expanding the productive base, linking exporters to broader domestic supply chains, and attracting new investment into sectors in which Jordan has genuine competitive potential. The objective should not simply be to export more, but to make exports a broader engine of growth, investment, and employment.
The labour market remains the test most closely connected to people’s daily lives. Although the economy is creating new jobs, unemployment among Jordanians remains close to 21 percent, a level too high to conclude that economic improvement is being felt broadly. This creates a paradox that deserves to sit at the centre of the discussion: how can new jobs be created while unemployment declines only slowly? Part of the answer lies in the growing number of new entrants to the labour market; another part lies in the mismatch between the skills of jobseekers and the jobs available, as well as the quality, wages, and geographic distribution of those jobs.
Employment policy therefore cannot remain separate from investment, education, and training policies. If investment flows into sectors that do not absorb jobseekers, or if the skills produced by the education system do not match the needs of emerging sectors, the economy may grow and create jobs without producing the required decline in unemployment.
Productivity is the link that connects growth, employment, and living standards. It is not enough simply for more people to work; each job must also become more capable of generating greater value and higher income. If worker and firm productivity remain limited, companies will have limited capacity to raise wages, expand, and compete, while the transition to higher growth will remain difficult. The question should therefore not stop at how many jobs have been created. It should extend to what kinds of jobs are being created, in which sectors, and how much value they add to the economy. A job created in a sector capable of innovation, expansion, and exports has a different economic impact from one in a sector with limited productivity and growth potential. Raising productivity is therefore essential to increasing incomes and turning aggregate economic growth into an improvement that citizens can actually feel.
Investment is the fuel without which this transformation will be difficult to achieve. Jordan’s economy cannot rely on public spending alone to finance the required leap, particularly given the country’s well-known fiscal constraints. The success of the next phase will therefore depend heavily on the state’s ability to attract private investment and turn major projects from plans and announcements into real economic activity. Here, too, it is important to distinguish between a project existing on paper and its impact existing in the economy. A project does not generate growth when it is announced; it does so when financing begins, work starts on the ground, supply chains develop, production commences, and jobs are created. The speed of implementation, removal of obstacles facing investors, consistency of procedures, and the ability of institutions to make timely decisions are therefore economic factors no less important than the size of the project itself.
This points to the need to develop the way the Vision is monitored. The early years were, by their nature, years of foundation-building: legislation, regulations, platforms, and projects at different stages of preparation and implementation. It was natural for a substantial share of the effort to focus on building the enablers the economy requires. But completing a procedure does not necessarily mean achieving an economic outcome. Monitoring should therefore gradually move from asking “How much have we completed?” to asking “What have we changed?” A project should be assessed by what it has added to growth, the investment it has stimulated, the sustainable jobs it has created, the expansion it has generated in production and exports, and the productivity gains it has delivered. Only then do completion rates acquire genuine economic meaning, and monitoring becomes a tool for identifying what works and accelerating it, while correcting what is underperforming, rather than merely recording completed initiatives.
For this reason, 2026 should not be treated as an ordinary year in the life of the Vision, but as a transition point between two phases. If the early years were largely devoted to building the necessary enablers, the years ahead must become the phase in which the economic return on those enablers becomes visible. What is needed now is not a new vision or additional headlines, but faster implementation of the projects with the greatest impact, removal of barriers to investment, closer alignment of education and training with labour-market needs, expansion of the productive and export base, and the placement of productivity at the centre of economic policy. Most importantly, priorities should shift from managing a long list of initiatives to focusing on the engines that can genuinely change the trajectory of growth and employment. The success of the next phase will depend more on the depth of impact than on the breadth of the project list.
A reading of the past few years does not justify pessimism, but neither does it allow complacency. Exports provide encouraging signals; growth is improving but needs to accelerate; jobs are being created but unemployment remains high; investment faces the test of moving from projects to production; and productivity remains the critical link. Protecting the Economic Modernisation Vision therefore does not mean defending everything that has been achieved, nor does it mean diminishing those achievements. It means examining the gap between implementation and impact before time becomes tighter. By 2033, the question will not be how many initiatives were completed or how many projects were announced, but whether Jordan has become a larger and more productive economy, with lower unemployment, higher incomes, and better opportunities. The direction established by the Vision can be built upon, but the next phase requires more than continued implementation; it requires faster impact. The challenge in the years ahead is no longer to prove that the Vision is being implemented, but to prove that implementation is changing the economy.
comments
Economic Modernisation Vision: The Progress Is There — But Where Is the Impact?
comments