 I'm not presenting a specific paper, but a general body of work that myself and my colleagues at UN Esq. are doing, and when ERF proposed this session and invited us to talk on behalf of the Arab region, I chose a set of slides and some stylized facts about some inequalities of outcomes in the Arab region. So I will not talk so much about the methodologies that were used to come up with these various facts, but instead I will just present graphically some of the faces of inequality in the Arab region. And I can, as I said, this is a joint body of work of our poverty and inequality team at the UN Esq. jointly with Khaled Abu Ismail, Hassan Hamia, Abdul Karim Jafar, and Junaan Juni. But this work has not been published yet. It's work in progress. The statistics may not be final. It depends also on approval from Esq. management of the methodologies, some vetting of the methodologies. And so I'm just presenting some preliminary results. And that's why I don't want to hold my colleagues to what I present now. I will quickly talk about multidimensional inequalities. And then I will focus on money metric inequalities in income and wealth, but just to start the discussion of the different types of inequalities of opportunities and outcomes, I will focus more on the inequalities of outcomes that we typically see and we discuss in relation to the Arab region. So on this front, our team is currently developing a development inequalities index. It's related to the human development index and several other indices that Esq is putting forward to discuss the development experience in the region. There's an economic resilience index and development challenges index. So when we started focusing specifically on inequalities, we took the frameworks, the structure of these existing indices, and applied them to the specific topic of inequalities. So the methodology behind the development of this index and the statistical tests that we performed on this index were intended to come up with a complementary index on inequalities but to keep comparability with the other development indices. So the current working version of the index has three dimensions, basic human development inequalities which consist of health inequalities, education inequalities, and something like economic living conditions which comprise income, wealth, and access to the financial market. Then dimension for governance inequalities which encompass inequalities in liberties, in civic liberties, inequalities in political participation, and inequalities in power distribution. And finally the dimension of environmental inequalities where we, because of limited information that is available, we are only controlling for exposure to air pollution and exposure or mortality from water, sanitation, and hygiene deprivations in the region. When we started developing this index, we wanted to get an overall picture of inequalities taking into account outcomes and opportunities, but then we chose to really focus on outcomes alone. And so all of the sub dimensions or individual indicators that are in this index are various, are measures of various outcome inequalities. We also, in each of these dimensions, sub dimensions and indicators, we try to distinguish vertical inequalities and horizontal inequalities to get a sense of the structure of experience of inequalities across the whole society. So in each of these, in most of these indicators, we are able to study, let's say, the gaps between demographic groups, specifically men and women, in those indicators, and across socioeconomic classes. So in most of these dimensions and indicators, we can see that they consist of vertical as well as horizontal variables measuring inequality. Okay, let me jump a little bit, let me just jump to the results of this exercise. We find that, so on this slide I show the scores of the development inequalities index across Arab countries, the lowest score indicating the lowest inequalities and the best performance is in the middle income countries of the Arab region. The worst scores, close to one, we have least developed and conflict affected countries. And then let's say the GCC sub region, we have, you know, somewhere throughout the distribution, a lot of them in the middle of the distribution. And I think this gives an interesting story about what kind of inequalities are felt in each sub region of the Arab world. In the one result we see here is that governance inequalities have the greatest contribution to the overall inequalities score. Environmental inequalities, at least as we measure them currently, take a small, have a small contribution, and then basic human development inequalities take the second largest contribution. And within these human development inequalities, it's the wealth and income that contribute most to the inequalities in wealth and income that contribute most to the overall multidimensional inequalities. Okay, we can see improvement over time between 2000 and 2020 in the majority of the region with some exceptions. And now we can, so this is kind of an introduction to the following slides where I will talk just a little bit more about this pillar or this dimension of human development inequalities, and then I will jump to talking about income and wealth. So if we look carefully at what happened between 2010 and 2020 in the majority of Arab countries, we would see that it's the human development inequalities that improved. And here I just want to make one small message that generally we see that across the whole region that in terms of basic health and education, most countries in the region made great stride in the past decade, but there are still some mixed results, and we'll also hear about this issue in the next two presentations by Rana Hendi and Paul Magdisi because they will talk more about health and education. And so one, so in this graph I show the general improvement in achievements in Arab countries, and on the vertical, on the horizontal axis I show the change in inequality between 2010 and 2020. We see that for most countries and most outcomes the points are in this quadrant of the graph, meaning that over the 10 years there has been general improvement in access and leveling of the field, so less inequality, but we see some mixed results where let's say completion of lower level of education, we can see much more improvement than completion of 12 years of education, we can see that, let's say here we have Jordan, Iraq, Comoros, so generally so the improvements are not across the board, across all indicators and across all groups of countries, and so it's worth keeping in mind that the development over the past 10 years has been not completely even. So education, especially higher level education and economic inequalities continue to be a problem in the region. So secondary education we see that there has been worsening of inequality across the region. Second set of results for the overall development inequalities index is that if we compare income inequality to this multidimensional inequalities we see worsening of the picture across most countries, so only in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain we see an improvement in ranking and improvement in the situation when we take into account the multidimensional, the human development, governance and environmental inequalities, but for the vast majority of countries we see a worse picture when we consider these other inequalities. Let me, here we go, and finally final slide on this topic is considering global rankings we find that all of the Arab countries rank in the bottom half of the world distribution, so out of 159 countries where 159 is the best score, lowest inequalities and one is the worst inequalities we see that Yemen and Mauritania are at the rock bottom and the rest of countries are in the bottom half of the world distribution. Let me talk just a little bit about income inequality. Here the issue is that we don't have good reliable data on the entire region so I will just present some results using household budget surveys which are available sporadically, not so frequently, not for all countries and they have all kinds of measurement problems that I will not get into here. I will be just presenting raw data from the surveys, so we find that the Gini coefficient from these household surveys, the Gini coefficient is quite low, Arab region average is a Gini of 35 compared to world average of 38. Looking at the income share of the top 10% of the population, again we have pretty low figures for inequality, around 25 to 34 of aggregate income share going to the top 10% of the population. If we, this is, we don't have good panel data, good reliable panel data on the entire region, if I just put all of these household surveys on one time graph I would get a picture like this and from here we might talk a little bit about the trend in this, these within country income inequalities and we might summarize something that in the, in the 90s income inequality was stagnating, then falling in the 2000s and perhaps picking up increasing in the 2010s and this would probably agree with, you know, the general story we hear around the world that in the 90s income inequality was rising, 2000s income inequality falling and then 2010s the kind of the picture is unclear and so, so, but that's kind of, that's the general picture we get. Now again these are not representative numbers, it just includes some countries for some years and so we should be cautious when we view this graph. Later on when we look at wealth inequality we will see actually very similar trends, something of a, you know, stagnating inequality in the 2000s and inequality picking up in wealth in 2010s, okay. If we look at, so we've talked about the Gini, I talked about the top 10% share, looking at poverty, things have been also going badly in the 2010s, poverty across most of the region has been rising, particularly in the least developed and conflict affected countries. If we look, if we take Arab region as one country and we account for both within country and between country inequalities, we get very different levels of inequalities. So in that case the top 10% share of incomes in the region becomes almost 60% and only 8.7% going to the top, to the bottom half of the region's population. If we compare it across world regions we see that Arab region is the outlier here. We have the smallest share going to the bottom 50% and the highest share going to the top 10%. Okay. Let me just mention in passing that one of the big issues we see in the Arab region and also in sub-Saharan Africa is that economic growth doesn't seem to trickle down to households, particularly in our case the households covered by national surveys and particularly to the poor households. So when we observe GDP or national accounts increasing by 1%, we typically only see incomes of poor households going up by 30%, 30 cents. Okay. Let me skip this story and let me talk just quickly about wealth inequality. I'm running out of time so I'll try to finish within two minutes. Here I am using data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, a data book. In this World Wealth Report or Global Wealth Report, Credit Suisse reports very selected statistics for each country for each year from the year 2000 to 2021. The data bank was updated just a week ago I think so. So this is using the newest data available from that. Using these selected statistics really only average wealth, median wealth in each country per year. We blow up, we estimate the full continuous distribution of wealth in each country, a very speculative exercise. And then we study the various inequality measures and trend over time across the region. So what has been so focusing on country's wealth distribution, so only within country inequality and ignoring between country differences, we see, let me just summarize that for the, we only have data from year 2000 to 2021. We see perhaps, we see a bit of a decrease in inequality in the early 2000s, then stagnation in roughly stagnation or a small increase in the 2000s and more of a picking up in the middle income countries, least developed and conflict affected countries in 2010s. We see the same trend for the top 10% share of national wealth. If we take into account both within country and between country inequalities, we see slightly different pictures of inequality we can say decreasing or stagnating in the 2000s and again picking up across most of the region except for the Gulf Cooperation Council countries in 2010s. What happened during COVID? I don't know, perhaps a small increase in inequality across most of the subregions of the Arab region. Okay, if we see huge differences in the wealth distribution across Gulf Cooperation Council, middle income countries, least developed countries and conflict affected countries in the region, to the extent that if we, these are the Lawrence curves for individual subregions in the region, we can see a lot of inequality in this. And if we draw one Lawrence curve for the entire Arab region and just plot who are the households, where do they come from, we can clearly see the color scheme is very clear that here we would only have the GCC country nationals, at the bottom we have only the least developed conflict affected country nationals and around the middle we see a lot of the people from middle income countries. So there's clear kind of polarization of the wealth distributions across the Arab subregions. Done. Thank you so much.