Jordan’s Reform Journey: Progress in the Face of Challenges

As countries across the world face the fallout from multiple crises, Jordan’s experience offers lessons in resilience and maintaining stability in the midst of turbulence. Over the past two decades, Jordan has weathered regional conflicts, pioneered a progressive and development-oriented refugee response model, and navigated the COVID-19 crisis and global commodity price shocks with adaptive policies.  Despite a challenging global environment, Jordan’s growth in the first nine months of 2022 accelerated to 2.7 percent, propelled by a strong recovery of tourism, the full reopening of the economy, and increased exports. Jordan’s inflation rates also remain contained compared to its regional peers. 

While responding to multiple crises has increased Jordan’s debt burden, the country has been able to successfully manage its debt by building investor confidence, accessing global financial markets, and promoting domestic revenue mobilization. Debt sustainability is also supported by high levels of concessionality in external borrowing and reliable domestic funding. 

These responses have shown the Kingdom’s resilience and ability to maintain stability in the face of crises.  Now Jordan has the opportunity to turn its attention to continuing its home-grown structural reforms to achieve inclusive, sustainable and investment-led growth and job creation, particularly for youth and women. 

Jordan Vision 2025, Jordan’s Reform Matrix, and the Economic Modernization Vision have set the course for the country’s reform journey. Jordan has taken important and difficult initial steps. For example, Jordan reformed and expanded its social protection system which is providing well targeted support to the most vulnerable households and workers. The innovative design, which leverages digital technologies, overcame many of the access challenges faced during COVID-19 and has become a recognized model in the region. The country is pushing critical policies and legislation that will help promote investment and improve labor market outcomes, including for women. Jordan has been an early mover in putting climate action at the center of the country’s development model and is taking key steps to promote efficiency, resilience, and financial sustainability in the energy and water sectors.

Jordan is also making progress on transparency and open data, which is at the core of good governance and evidence-based decision-making. This was recently recognized by Open Data Inventory (ODIN), which measures countries’ statistical offerings and data openness.  Between 2020 and 2022, Jordan jumped from 82nd to 37th in ODIN’s global rankings.  The country has also implemented a public procurement reform and introduced e-procurement systems (JONEPS) for enhanced efficiency and transparency.

Despite this progress, Jordan’s reform journey won’t be linear or easy – it never is. There will always be trade-offs between a focus on stability and reform, and continued external pressures. The forthcoming World Bank update to its Systematic Country Diagnostic, an analytic product on how a country can reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity, will highlight the need for Jordan to follow through with its reform agenda while building on past achievements and communicating results.

Jordan is well-positioned to accelerate reform implementation—building on recent successes in crisis response— to generate investment-led growth, create new opportunities for its people, and develop resilient systems to manage future shocks.  The Economic Modernization Vision and its Executive Program for 2023-2025 provide an important roadmap for progress. As we begin to develop the Bank’s new five-year country partnership strategy for Jordan, we will continue to be at Jordan’s side throughout this journey—for the successes and for the difficult stretches.

Jean-Christophe Carret is Country Director for the Mashreq for the World Bank