ECONOMIC POLICIES FOR FEMALE LABOUR AND FOOD NUTRITION SECURITY: THE AL-GHAB REGION CASE

Dealing with the issue of poverty, food security and social disparities becomes an even more pressing prerogative for the policy maker during economic downturns. The debate among the economists focuses on what might be the major policy initiatives to be undertaken in order to produce complementarities between growth and income-redistribution. These would involve not only generating an inequality-reducing pattern of growth but also undertaking a growth-enhancing pattern of redistribution. Developing countries are the most sensitive to this issue and are committed to develop the policy measure able to both stimulate economic growth and reduce social disparities and food insecurity. The Al-Ghab region in Syria is considered the typical resource rich poor area in a developing country. The possibility to activate the economic growth in this area goes through the exigency of diversify the economic production to stimulate the value added generation and reduce the social and economic disparities between female and male labour employment. In this way the problem of food insecurity should be better address since it is strongly connected to the poverty level of households. To address this complex target an extended multi-sector model is considered the most suitable analysis instrument especially since it is developed by means of the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for the area of interest. In this paper, we develop a SAM for the Al-Ghab region and quantify the effects of selected policy scenarios in terms of economic diversification, female labour efficiency and food nutrition security for the Al-Ghab region, in order to identify the pillars able to sustain the economic growth of the area.