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Poor Places, Thriving People
behind. The governorates that share Cairo’s favorable demography are either urban (Alexandria, Port Said, and Giza) or new developments (S. Sinai). Overall, education is important too, albeit less so than demography, as illustrated by the gap between the top line and the middle line in figure 3.6 and between the middle and right-hand columns in figure 3.7. The metropolitan governorates of Cairo, Alexandria, and Giza share the same educational advantages. If there were no spatial disparities in demography and education, the rural-urban gap might be less than half of what it is (figure 3.7). In Djibouti, different lagging districts have different types of spatial disparity (figure 3.8). The districts of Tadjoura, Obock, Ali-Sabieh, and Dikhil all appear at first sight to be in the same situation, with per capita household consumption well below Djibouti City’s, but the breakdown of causes is different. In fact, disparities between Tadjoura and Obock on the one hand, and Djibouti City on the other, increase when one takes away their demographic differences, meaning that these two outlying districts have more favorable demographic characteristics than the capital. For Ali-Sabieh and Dikhil, demographic differences do play a role in creating spatial disparities, as witnessed by the upward curling tail in the demography-adjusted curve. For Dikhil, demography is particularly crucial. If all of Djibouti’s districts had the same demography, mean per capita consumption in Dikhil would be 65 percent of that in Djibouti City as opposed to the observed 46 percent, and Dikhil would be the richest district outside Djibouti City instead of the poorest. For education it is the other way around; there are significant educational differences between Djibouti City on the one hand and Tadjoura and Obock on the other. For Ali-Sabieh and Dikhil, however, educational disadvantage is not a major factor after demography has been taken into account. If one compares urban (mostly Djibouti City) with rural Djibouti (figure 3.9), the demography of rural Djibouti helps to mitigate the rural-urban gap. If rural and urban areas had the same demographic characteristics, the gap would be 4 percentage points higher. This is a very unusual finding, as we shall see when we look at the other countries. Education, however, has the usual prodisparity effect. With demographic characteristics accounted for, education disparities add 11 percentage points to the rural-urban gap. Jordan is an interesting case, because at the time of this writing, the country is considering a strategy of regionalization and regional development to combat spatial inequality. In fact, Jordan has low intergovernorate disparities (figure 3.10). The coefficient of variation of governorate means per capita household consumption is only 0.19, compared with