Syria | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The rate of population growth averaged over 3 percent annually for much of the last fifty years of the twentieth century but had slowed to 2.4 percent by 2003. Syria's high population growth rate places enormous sociopolitical strains on a country with very limited water and other resources.

Beginning in March 1963, when the Arab Socialist Renaissance (Ba'th) Party came to power in the wake of a military coup d'etat, the Syrian government gradually extended state control over key components of the national economy. State intervention reached its peak from 1965 to 1970 with the nationalization of the banking, industrial, and trade sectors, together with the establishment of a network of production and distribution cooperatives and state farms. The government later relaxed a few of the restrictions on the private sector; however, Syria remained a predominantly statist economy into the twenty-first century. With gross domestic product (GDP) growth at less than 1 percent in 2003, major distortions contributing to the weak performance of the Syrian economy included multiple exchange rate controls, major agricultural subsidies, price controls, an inefficient state-run financial system, and numerous state-owned enterprises. Given its relatively high rate of population growth, in 2002 the World Bank estimated that Syria's GDP would have to grow more than 5 percent annually to improve the welfare of its people.

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