A new report from the UN’s Devel­op­ment Pro­gram mea­sures the devel­op­ment stan­dards of the Arab region. The report called “Chal­lenges to Human Secu­rity in the Arab Coun­tries” uses the term “human secu­rity” when talk­ing about basic needs.

The report from the UN gives us a few sta­tis­tics of poverty inArab nations that are worth not­ing. We found a sum­mary of those stats at the MEMRI Blog.

A sur­vey of a sam­ple rep­re­sent­ing 65% of the pop­u­la­tion indi­cates that the aver­age level of poverty was the low­est in Lebanon and Syria with a rate of 28.6–30 per­cent, the high­est in Yemen at 59.9 per­cent, and 41 per­cent in Egypt.

Based on the sur­vey, the report esti­mates that 65 mil­lion peo­ple live at the poverty line.

In 2005, unem­ploy­ment was esti­mated at 14.4% in the Arab coun­tries, com­pared with 6.3 per­cent glob­ally. Unem­ploy­ment among youth rep­re­sents the biggest social challenge.