The rural-urban gap remains the single most well-documented development and welfare disparity in the economies of the Near East and North Africa (NENA). The gap between rural and urban areas can be seen in the lower productivity of economic activities, higher poverty levels and lower quality infrastructure and services in rural areas.

While the size of the rural-urban gap is well-documented, there has been little recent analytical work on either this issue or on agricultural policies in NENA. The latest rural poverty report of the World Bank was issued in 2002 (World Bank, 2002); the World Bank page on “agricultural and rural development in MENA” has not been updated in ten years (World Bank, 2008); and discussions of agricultural policy are dominated by threats to food security posed by imports and water scarcity (Woertz, 2017).

What does the rural-urban gap in the NENA economies mean, and why doesn’t rural-urban inequality attract more attention? This note is intended to clarify the significance of the rural-urban gap. It begins by defining the gap, and then explores some of the reasons for the appearance of the rural-urban gap. Finally, it outlines some policies on rural transformation designed to bridge the rural-urban gap.