Areen Miqdad

*Why stability alone has not delivered economic opportunity

A whole generation in Jordan lives with a question that does not disappear. Can I build a stable life here? It is not a dramatic question. It is not a political slogan. It comes from daily outcomes. From the years it can take to find stable work. From the way life plans get delayed. From the pressure this creates on housing, marriage, movement, and even the idea of staying.

In Jordan, the economy is not something you only read about. You hear it. You hear it in taxis. You hear it at family tables. People talk about salaries that do not stretch. They talk about wasta that opens doors. They talk about waiting years for something that feels secure. At the same time, Jordan is also known as one of the major recipients of foreign support in the world, especially relative to its size and resources. For decades, and especially during regional crises and major shocks, Jordan has received large and sustained international assistance. So the debate cannot stop at whether aid exists. The debate has to ask what that aid becomes once it enters the country. Where does it go? What does it pay for? What does it change?

But stability is not the same as transformation. Stability keeps you standing. Transformation helps you move forward. And for young Jordanians, forward has a clear meaning. It means work that pays. It means a path that rewards effort. It means an economy that expands opportunity instead of managing scarcity.

After 2011, the urgent goal was survival. Regional shocks and refugee pressures forced the government and donors to focus on what could not fail. Services had to keep running. Municipalities had to cope. Systems could not break. A large share of aid followed this logic, and it helped. Schools absorbed more students. Municipalities carried heavier demand. Basic services avoided overload.

A large part of aid supports the government’s financial stability. This includes budget support and cash transfers. It helps the government meet obligations and reduce the risk of fiscal crisis. In 2021, USAID disbursed about 845.1 million dollars to the Government of Jordan through its cash transfer program. Most of it was general budget support, with a smaller part tied to qualifying debt service. This is one direct answer to the question people ask. A lot of aid goes to keeping the state stable and functioning.

Another part goes to service systems inside ministries, especially in sectors like education. A Program for Results that began in 2017 supported teacher training, national assessment systems, and expanded kindergarten places. These reforms matter. They can improve procedures, access, and delivery. But they often reach people indirectly and slowly. Better schooling takes time to show up in better jobs. It also does not automatically push firms to invest or hire more. A ministry can improve while the private sector remains cautious and constrained.

A third part goes to crisis response and the costs of hosting refugees. This includes support through the Jordan Response Plan and funding for municipalities and public services in high pressure areas. This assistance is essential for continuity. It keeps services from breaking. It reduces pressure and helps keep tensions from rising.

When you put these forms together, the picture becomes clearer. Much of aid is doing what it was designed to do. It keeps the system running. It prevents things from getting worse. It protects stability. That is meaningful. It may even be the main reason Jordan remained steady through repeated shocks. But this also explains why many people feel a gap between the scale of support and the reality of daily life. Preventing collapse is not the same as producing opportunity. Continuity is not the same as mobility.

If transformation is happening, it should show up first in the labor market. Youth unemployment stayed extremely high. For ages 15 to 24, it remained around 41 to 44 percent between 2020 and 2024. This is not a statistic you can leave in a report. It shapes life choices. It delays marriage and housing. It pushes migration. It weakens trust. It also strengthens the pull of wasta and the public sector. Not because people love dependency, but because instability pushes people toward whatever feels safer.

After COVID, the same pattern became even more visible. Jordan needed more funding, and the priority became protecting stability and social spending again. Donors responded in line with that goal. By July 31, 2024, the planning ministry recorded about 2.07 billion dollars in foreign assistance. This included about 584 million in grants and 1.35 billion in loans for development projects and budget support, along with grants under the Jordan Response Plan. The scale is large. So the question returns in a sharper form. If so much money keeps coming in, why does the economy still feel tight for so many people.

Part of the answer is that budget support can be necessary, but it can also be invisible. If it prevents fiscal stress from turning into instability, the outcome is that things do not get worse. That matters. But many people do not experience “not getting worse” as progress.

Another part of the answer is that better service delivery does not automatically create jobs. Systems can improve while the private sector still struggles to hire at scale. Firms hire when incentives change. When access to finance improves. When competition is fair. When rules are predictable. When productive investment becomes worthwhile. Without these shifts, job outcomes move slowly, even when programs are implemented well.

A third part is about incentives and measurement. Donors prefer what they can count and verify. Governments under pressure prefer what reduces risk and keeps things calm. So the easiest programs to fund are the ones with clear outputs. Work permits issued. Classrooms supported. Municipal services delivered. These are real gains. But they fit a stability model more than a transformation model. Productivity growth and business upgrading take longer, and they are harder to link to one project or one funding cycle. The system rewards what is measurable, not always what is transformational.

If transformation were happening at scale, we would expect to see a clearer change in outcomes. We do not. Government Effectiveness in the Worldwide Governance Indicators was in the mid 60s percentile in 2023, without a clear jump from earlier years. Human development remained relatively high and improved gradually, but there was no visible productivity shift that would lead to faster hiring. Overall, services became steadier, while the job engine did not change much.

There are two counterarguments that deserve respect. The first is that donors may be getting exactly what they want. They want a stable partner in the region, so they fund stability. If that is the objective, then the model is working. The second is that this period is not normal for Jordan. The refugee burden and regional shocks make the counterfactual serious. Without large support, Jordan could have faced much worse outcomes. Stabilization itself is an achievement.

I agree with both points. That is exactly why the debate should be clearer. If stability is the goal, we should say that openly. If transformation is also the goal, then stability cannot be the finish line. It has to be the foundation.

A better approach does not mean less support. It means support that is clearer, more transparent, and more tied to outcomes people can feel.

People should be able to track aid in public language. They should be able to see how much is budget support, how much is loans, how much is grants, and what each part is supposed to achieve. When citizens cannot trace where money goes, trust becomes harder, even when programs are real.

Success should also be measured by outcomes, not only outputs. Outputs matter, but they should not become the main definition of progress. If aid is meant to support transformation, it should be linked to productivity and job creation, not only to completed activities and reporting milestones.

Jordan has already done something difficult. It stayed stable through years of shocks. But stability should not be the ceiling of our ambition. Jordan has a roadmap for growth, including the Economic Modernization Vision. The real test is whether our aid model and our policy incentives help turn stability into opportunity, especially for the young people who are still waiting for a future that feels possible.

*Areen Miqdad is a master’s student in the International Studies program at NC State University