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 living in villages unrecognized by the Israeli government poverty incidence was nearly 80 %, and poverty severity, as measured by the Sen-Poverty index, was as high as seven times than that among the mainstream population in Israel, i.e., the Jewish population (excluding the—predominantly poor—ultra orthodox Jews). 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 of being poor. We show that the rapid increase of Arab women’s student enrollment rates not only reduced the education gap compared to Arab men but importantly adds to poverty reduction through various channels. Bedouin households, especially in the unrecognized villages, were found to have much less access to infrastructure compared to other Arabs, thus implying that the lack in infrastructure forms a significant barrier to women’s participation in the labor force. This was also found to have an adverse indirect effect on the completion of schooling, and indirectly on mothers’ fertility, keeping it relatively high by reducing education’s potentially diminishing effect on poverty. A considerable mismatch between skills and employment was found among Arab academics, thus pointing at the possibility of discrimination and segregation in the relevant labor market. Considering various transmission mechanisms, we show that government intervention in infrastructure has a high expected social return, both through direct and indirect channels and could, thus, help in interrupting the vicious circle of poverty.
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Notes
- 1.
Dunam = 0.247 Acre or 0.1 Hectare.
- 2.
See Porat (2000).
- 3.
The Ottoman Ordinance regarded uncultivated lands as "dead" lands ("Mawwat" in Arabic). The Ordinance prescribed that one who cultivates lands can register them in one's name, while the State retains the principal title. In 1921, the British Mandate government published a Lands Ordinance based on the Ottoman Lands Ordinance. The British Ordinance allowed people who cultivate "Mawwat Lands" to register the lands in their name. One who did not register the lands lost his right to the title. See citation of Granovski in Swirski and Hasson, (2005, in Hebrew).
- 4.
The State Comptroller (2002, p. 115).
- 5.
Government resolution No. 179 [BD/1] dated November 18, 1979.
- 6.
Its formal name is the "Acquisition of Land in The Negev Law—The Peace Treaty with Egypt, 5740—1980". Under this law, people who claimed lands in an extent of up to 100 dunam were offered to vacate and relocate to a developed plot in Kuseife or Ar'ara, or alternatively be awarded full financial compensation.
- 7.
See document by the Director of the Southern District of the Ministry of the Interior, Dudu Cohen, in 2002. "The reality of the Administration for the Promotion of the Bedouin […], the Authority for Bedouin Education, the Welfare Department for the Bedouin in the Dispersion […] create a sentiment among the Bedouin of being an aberrant population […] which is not entitled to receive direct and professional service from the various government offices, as applied to the Jewish population […]. The Bedouin Administration could (and perhaps should) handle but a single area specific to the Bedouin sector, which is the area of title claims and land settlements. […] the question is posed whether its organizational emplacement should be with the Israel Land Administration, the Ministry of Justice or the Ministry of Finance…" [Quoted from Swirski and Hasson, (in Hebrew) 2005, p. 16].
- 8.
Following the official Israeli definition, persons aged 0–18 are referred to as children.
- 9.
We have selected the non-orthodox Jewish society as a reference group since poverty in the orthodox population is a singular phenomenon that requires separate reference. See also Gottlieb (2007).
- 10.
The issue of aggregation relates to the calculation of an index on the basis of specific information regarding poverty in households or individuals. The simplest aggregation method is to count the poor. This index, though widely used, ignores differences in the severity of poverty among families. In the professional literature various aggregation methods account for poverty severity such as the Sen-Index, its extension by Shorrocks (1995), the quadratic income-gap measure by Foster et al. (1984) or the to name but a few. The issue of identification deals with questions of "what is poverty” and "who is poor". The discussion about poverty lines relates to the first question while the discussion of income sources relates to the second. See also Sen and Foster ( 1997), or Ravallion (1994).
- 11.
See www.btl.gov.il.
- 12.
See for example Townsend (1962), Desai and Shah (1988), Saunders (2003) and Deutsch and Silber (2006). Other important approaches, such as the NAS approach, published in Citro and Michael (1995) or the MBM approach described in Human Resources Development Canada, (2003) have been calculated in Gottlieb and Manor (2005) for Israeli data.
- 13.
We use the official Israeli equivalence scale which is based on the traditional food-share scale of the Engel type: The values of the scale are 1.25, 2, 2.65, 3.2, 3.75, 4.25, 4.75, 5.2 for one, two persons, etc. respectively until it reaches 6 for 10 persons, continuing with an addition of 0.4 for each additional person. Israeli families are in general much larger than those found in Western countries. This is mainly due to Jewish and Muslim religiosity. Therefore, the scale is not truncated for particularly large families. The numbers for the lower sized families are quite similar to those of the OECD scale that prevailed before the OECD switched to using the square root of family size.
- 14.
Equivalent income refers to the economies of scale (“savings”) in expenditures per individual with the increase in family size. Such economies of scale are mainly due to the indivisibility of capital that can be enjoyed by more than one person without infringing the use by other household members, such as the use of the kitchen by all family members, etc.
- 15.
A few of those living adjacently to recognized communities might be included in the sample.
- 16.
While the number of Arab households in the income and expenditure surveys of the CBS in 2004 was 1,858 and 646, respectively, the corresponding number in the Galilee Society’s survey was 2,680 (exclusive of Bedouin in unrecognized villages). The number of households of unrecognized villages in their sample was 570, reflecting oversampling.
- 17.
As mentioned above, the FES approach can be interpreted as reflecting persistent poverty, which by definition will typically be lower than total poverty, since part of the poor may be in temporary poverty. Calculations of true persistent poverty require panel data on incomes and expenditures over time. Such data is not available in Israel. Here, half-median persistent poverty is approximated by the headcount of individuals, for whom both income and consumption are below the official poverty line (see also the Bank of Israel’s Annual Report, 2006, chapter 8 and the NII’s poverty report for 2007).
- 18.
Poverty data over time are based on CBS Data, thus excluding non-recognized villages.
- 19.
This is possible when the young generation of persistently poor families, who find it difficult to escape poverty, create new families. The likelihood of such a phenomenon probably increases inversely with low levels of education and high fertility rates.
- 20.
One of the criticisms made against the relative approach pertains to its diminished sensitivity to growth, since the poverty line adapts each year to developments in the median income.
- 21.
See for example Basu (2002).
- 22.
Alesina and Glaeser (2004), find heterogeneity in the population to be an important determinant of poverty. They argue that heterogeneity leads to discrimination that arises from the fact that minorities, little appreciated by the “mainstream” groups, will be underrepresented in government and so is their share of federal and local government budgets.
- 23.
Economically weak local authorities have been entitled to grants in order to provide services to the public.
- 24.
See for example Geda et al (2005).
- 25.
See for example Benhabib et al. (2006).
- 26.
- 27.
Variables with a significance level above 10 %, except for the Area variable, were omitted from the table.
- 28.
Such a result, which is consistent with the life-cycle hypothesis, was significant in part of the regressions, but not in the ones presented in the table.
- 29.
These issues have not been studied in this work.
- 30.
It only mentions the "lack of convenient and regular transportation to work places". Moreover, the State has not bothered thus far to study the topic through an official survey of the CBS.
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Acknowledgment
The Hebrew version of the paper was written for the program “Economics and Society” headed by Professor Arie Arnon at the Van Leer Institute and financed by the National Insurance Institute Research Fund. Special thanks to Alex Fruman for excellent research assistance and Sarah Gargi for preparing the English version for publication. We thank Ismael Abu-S’aad, Aamer El-Huzayel, and Aamer Abu-Qarn, Valérie Bérenger, Florent Bresson, Ramsis Gera, Jacques Silber, and an anonymous referee for useful comments. Opinions expressed are of the authors and should not be attributed to any of the mentioned institutions.
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Abu-Bader, S., Gottlieb, D. (2013). Poverty, Education, and Employment Among the Arab-Bedouin in Israel. In: Berenger, V., Bresson, F. (eds) Poverty and Social Exclusion around the Mediterranean Sea. Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion and Well-Being, vol 9. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5263-8_8
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