Thanks to the political pyrotechnics of its talented dictator, Syria's economics and infrastructure tend to be left as an afterthought. Hafiz al-Asad somehow manages to act like the ruler of a significant power, even when its material base is terrible and getting progressively worse. Winckler, a lecturer at the University of Haifa, takes the original step of putting politics and even political economy aside, focusing instead on the population trends of recent decades. He has no choice but to rely on Syrian statistics, not known for their reliability; though he is ever-so polite about the question of veracity, there are points in his fine study when he concludes that the numbers simply cannot be true. For example, he delicately suggests that the published fertility rates for the years around 1990 must have been "exaggerated by a considerable extent."
Starting from the premise that rapid population growth constitutes "the most critical socioeconomic problem" in much of the Middle East, Winckler notes that Syria's population growth rates have been among the highest in the entire region. He concludes, unsurprisingly, that Syria "has been unable to reach a balance between economic growth and population growth." More controversially, he predicts that Syria "has a better chance" to overcome its population problems than do Jordan or Egypt.
Along the way, Winckler unearths many interesting and curious facts: over a third of Syrian women were married below the minimum legal age (17); 95 percent of first marriages are intact; the huge number of children and the few women at work combine to give Syria a total crude economically active rate about half that of developed countries. Over half of Syria's unemployed are in Damascus (which has only 10 percent of the population). In most ways Syria is unexceptional, following the trends of its region; in one way, however, it stands out: urbanization has gone less to the two main cities (Damascus and Aleppo) and more to the provincial towns (like Raqqa and Tartus).
