Allison Spencer Hartnett, Yale University; Ezzeldeen al-Natour, Independent Researcher; and Laith al-Ajlouni, Independent Researcher
Introduction
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan stands out for its aggressive response to the COVID-19 pandemic in comparison to other MENA countries. Two weeks after the first case was announced on March 2, 2020, Jordan decided to “flatten the curve” with a multi-pronged approach centered around mandatory physical distancing with a nationwide curfew, closed borders, and military patrols of the like last seen in the early 1990s.
Jordan’s high coercive capacity is at the heart of its response. The prominent role of the coercive apparatus in formulating and implementing the COVID-19 response also underscores the marginalization of the bureaucratic and civil state in a time of crisis. With the police and military strategically controlling population movement early on, the state played to its martial strengths in order to compensate for long-standing deficiencies in other realms of state capacity.
As every country grapples with the question of how to respond to a pandemic in a globalized world, we reflect on how pre-existing problems of state capacity contextualize the lived experience of lockdown in the case of Jordan. Using an original survey, we describe how ordinary Jordanians’ experience the lockdown personally and in their locality. We then reflect on what this means for the political preferences of the Jordanian public in the short to medium term. The pandemic has exacerbated a decades-long trend of increasing economic precarity for the Jordanian labor force. Economic woes here, as in other country contexts, are fueling a move toward grassroots “right-wing” populism that could become more pronounced as the lockdown leaves more Jordanians outside the social safety net.
Data, Methodology, and Findings
Most accounts of Jordan’s aggressive approach to suppressing the public health effects of COVID-19 narrate a story that begins and ends in Amman. This is true for two reasons. First, policy-making in Jordan is highly centralized, and local governments have no autonomy to formulate their own responses to the pandemic. Second, accounts of Jordanian political life rarely extend beyond the borders of the capital city, a trend reinforced by current restrictions on domestic movement. For a summary of policies, dates implemented, and a running tally of COVID-19 cases, see Table A1 in the Appendix. Throughout this analysis, we cite the official COVID-19 case count from the Jordanian Ministry of Health website.1
We conducted a subnational pilot study from March 30 to April 1, 2020 that asked respondents to evaluate how the COVID-19 lockdown affected their personal and communal economic well-being. We also asked them to rate their access to health care and to tell us how the government was enforcing the curfew in their locality.
This study is preliminary and comes with several caveats. We used a snowball sampling methodology that is often effective in reaching hard-to-study populations such as populations under lockdown.2 Given that this is not a random sample, we are unable to validate our conclusions statistically. What we provide, however, is rich contextual evidence for how the economic effects of the curfew vary by locality and by sector, and provide an original account of how Jordanians witness their government’s management of a global public health crisis.
We interviewed a total of 188 individuals across Jordan’s 12 governorates.3 Figure 1 maps the distribution of our 188 respondents by sub-district. The governorates with the highest response rates were Irbid (45) – Jordan’s only city under isolation – and Tafileh (41).
Figure 1: Map of Survey Respondents by Subdistrict (n=188)
State Capacity and Pandemic Policy Implementation
The efficacy of the lockdown is determined by two factors: the health system’s ability to treat infected patients and the coercive apparatus’ ability to keep citizens at home. Our respondents had a high opinion of both.
Participants in our survey generally approved of the Jordanian health care system. 87.2% of respondents said that they believed that they would have adequate access to health care if they needed it. The majority of Jordanian hospitals are public, and the military-run Royal Medical Services account for 34% of all public sector hospital beds. Jordan’s medical system is unprepared to accommodate a fast influx of patients; hospitals only have 1.4 beds per 1000 inhabitants, which is lower than the global average.4 The state’s strategy to minimize cases and protect the healthcare system through curfews and lockdowns appears to be working. By April 10, there were only 372 cases out of a population of 9.7 million, and only a percentage of our respondents in Irbid, Amman, al-Karak, and Ma’an reported knowing a COVID-19 patient in their area.
Jordan justified its strict lockdown measures by the necessity of maintaining the capacity of the health sector to absorb the people infected with COVID-19. We asked our respondents to tell us about the entity primarily responsible for enforcing the curfew in their locality and how enforcement was accomplished. The PSD, Jordan’s police force, was reported to be the primary enforcer of these policies by our respondents. Irbid governorate is the notable exception where the military is the primary enforcing body of a regional isolation order due to a local spike in cases. The bureaucracy and decentralized political bodies like municipalities, mayors, or governorate councils appear to play a minor or non-existent role in enforcing the Defense Orders. See Table A2 in the appendix for a governorate-level summary of our main results.
We also asked our respondents what enforcement looks like in their area. Combinations of arrests, rounds by officials, and road closure checkpoints were present in every district, but to different extents. Checkpoints were cited by respondents from every governorate. Arrests for curfew violations were reported in every governorate except for Aqaba, Jerash, and Ajlun. 22% of respondents from Ajloun reported that they did not witness any security services at all. In the capital Amman, rounds and checkpoints were the most frequently cited forms of implementation, although seven respondents also reported arrests in their locality.
The majority of Jordanians agree that this response is the right one, at least in the short term. According to a survey by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, 91% of Jordanians believe that things are going in the right direction. In the same survey, 71% of the population believes that the activation of the defense law and the curfew came at the right time, and a majority (62%) supports a partial curfew in lieu of a complete lockdown. One respondent in our survey from Hosha, Mafraq made peace with the closure of his business as “a sacrifice for my homeland.”
Fiscal Capacity and Unequal Economic Effects
The lockdown has brought Jordan’s economy to a standstill, and long-standing structural inequalities mean that the most vulnerable are the first to suffer. “The cost until now is 56 Jordanian patients suffering from this virus. The rest is just details,” stated the Jordanian Minister of Finance, Mohammad Al-Ississ, when asked about the coronavirus’ impact on the Jordanian economy.5 However, the strategy for suppressing the pandemic weighs heavily on the Jordanian labor force and firm owners. Within days of announcing the curfew, Jordanian businesses started to report complaints due to the interruption of cash flows. The Jordanian Private Schools Syndicate declared that a high proportion of private schools might not be able to pay teachers monthly wages. Moreover, 67% of Jordanian employers are thinking of laying off some of their employees if the curfew continues for a longer time.6
Prior to the pandemic, the Jordanian government was forced to enter a period of austerity while poverty rates, the informal sector, and unemployment grew. According to official numbers before the pandemic, 15.7% of Jordanians lived under the poverty line, and 19% of them were unemployed. Estimates for the unemployment rate climb to almost 40% among Jordanian youth.7 Informal workers constitute around 46% of the Jordanian labor force and 25% of national income.8 Most firms in the country are micro or small enterprises9 and are less likely to access credit or have savings to weather the crisis. In our survey sample, 62.9% of the unemployed respondents said that they are unemployed due to the virus, and 58% of the respondents said their income was impacted negatively by the pandemic. Table A2 reports the full breakdown by governorate.
Table 1 shows a breakdown of our sample by sector. Jordan’s drastic public health strategy is most severely felt among the day laborers and informal sector workers. 86.7% of informal workers in our sample reported that their income has been negatively affected by government measures, and 71.4% have lost their job because of the curfew. “My daily subsistence comes entirely from my shop, and now it’s closed,” said one respondent from the Southern Ghor district in al-Karak. Another respondent from al-Tafileh reported that they couldn’t pay their monthly bills due to pandemic-related unemployment. An informal worker from northern Mazar in Irbid said that the lockdown made his work impossible: “I work in satellite maintenance. It’s my main source of income. Now with the curfew, I can’t go out and work.” The most vulnerable segments of the Jordnian labor force are also those most likely to suffer the long-term economic consequences of the pandemic due to persistent unemployment and other financial burdens like debt that push them deeper into poverty.
Public employees feel the economic effects of the curfew the least of all sectors; 42.6% cite income loss and 25% lost their job. In general, these respondents depend on additional sources of income in the private sector to improve their living conditions.
Table 1: Economic Effects of COVID-19 Measures by Sector
| Sector | N | Income negatively impacted | Job lost due to curfew (of those who said they are currently unemployed, n=134) |
| Public | 47 | 42.6%
(20) |
25% (7) |
| Private | 77 | 54.5%
(42) |
36.2% (17) |
| Informal | 45 | 86.7%
(39) |
71.4% (42) |
| INGOs and NGOs | 5 | 40% (2) |
N/A |
| Other | 14 | 42.9%
(6) |
0% |
| Total | 188 | 58% (109) |
41% (55) |
A survey by the Center for Strategic Studies Survey shows that these early days may only be a preview of continued economic hardship.10 67% of employers are thinking of laying off some of their employees if the curfew continues. 44% of private sector workers didn’t receive their paycheck by the end of March, and 36% of them borrowed money from their friends or families to cover their expenses. Although 31% of Jordanian workers are able work from home, 59% are not working at all. With the expected closure of micro and small enterprises, the lockdown will push more people out of the formal labor market, decimating incomes, and decreasing much needed tax revenue.
At the policy level, the lockdown devastated the government’s economic policy goals for 2020. After a period of austerity from 2012 to 2018, the 2019 and 2020 budgets shifted toward more expansive welfare policies, including a sales tax exemption for several commodities and new economic stimulus packages. After the passage of controversial tax reforms in 2018, the IMF and World Bank extended loans to finance these expansionary measures.11 With the pivot to emergency response, the government will be unable to fund policies that would have resulted in improvement of public services like health and education.
The government is keenly aware of these inequalities. As part of Defense Order Number 4, the government initiated a special account at the Central Bank to receive donations from the private sector and the public, and redirect it to day laborers, informal workers, and needy families. However, those funds might not be sufficient and the government will need more funds to subsidize micro and small enterprise wages to maintain employment rates. Such funds will be only secured through borrowing, which will consume public revenues now and in the future. Jordan’s public debt service consumed around 11.1% of the government total expenditure in 2019 and around 14.8% of the total local revenues.12
Poverty and Populism Pre- and Post-COVID-19
Our pilot study underscores a need to disaggregate geographically and sectorally to understand the short, medium, and long-term implications of a complete lockdown. While undoubtedly these policies are a public health victory, we need to be mindful that this crisis has exacerbated long-standing inequalities in the Jordanian economy and introduced new political uncertainties. We offer four conclusions from our examination of Jordan’s lockdown response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
First, the pre-pandemic Jordanian economy left many citizens hanging on the margins of the social safety net. High informality and high unemployment pre-pandemic and stagnating incomes for the middle class mean that the lockdown has made a bad situation worse for informal and day wage workers, as well as micro and small business owners who make up the majority of the Jordanian labor force. Under crisis conditions, their income evaporates and small businesses will likely be unable to bear the cost of long-term closure. Informal workers and firms are unregistered and therefore illegible to the state, leaving them unable to access the social safety net. In a post-pandemic Jordan, this shock will further hamper the government’s plans to increase tax revenue from a strapped population who may struggle to find work, particularly in the informal sector if firms are forced to close.
Second, the crisis amplifies Jordanians’ deepening distrust in the central political institutions. According to the Arab Barometer Survey, Jordanians consistently trust the military more than either elected or appointed officials. Figure 2 shows that while Jordanian trust in the Parliament and Government has declined significantly since 2007, 95.3% expressed trust in the military in 2019. This trend is unlikely to change as unpopular policies related to the economy fall under the government’s mandate. Unpopular policies are frequently blamed on the government, and the typical strategy is for a government to be dissolved in the face of popular discontent.13 Furthermore, widespread perceptions of government corruption and legacies of austerity plague the current government, even as they planned to embark on expansive welfare spending that will almost certainly be undermined by the current crisis. With the governments’ limited fiscal capacity and a low trust among the public, respondents in our own sample show how local communities are banding together independent of the state. One al-Zarqa resident reported that his family tried to send a donation to those affected by the lockdown. “The community, relatives, and neighbors are trying to help others survive the crisis,” another said. Respondents from Amman and al-Karak reported individuals helping those in their social circles and reports of receiving assistance from other residents.
Figure 2: Trust levels in state institutions according to the Arab Barometer Survey
Third, we believe that worsening economic conditions and the new national role assumed by the military have transformative implications for Jordanian politics. This should not be interpreted as a power play by the military. It is important to remember that procedure has been followed and the enforcement authority enjoyed by the coercive apparatus is entirely legal and granted by the executive and legislative branches. Rather, the pandemic response provides policy evidence of a trend that many Jordanians already subscribed to before the outbreak began, namely that the coercive apparatus can be more trusted to “take care of business” than civil state. Furthermore, in a country where political and economic power often enable connected individuals to skirt the rules, it appears that even the elite are not insulated from the rule of law under lockdown. Two MPs were arrested on April 3, 2020 for violating the defense orders in Amman.14 The state’s demonstrated capacity and widespread acceptance of the military’s current role may raise Jordanians’ expectations concerning efficient and fair law enforcement.
Fourth and finally, the coercive apparatus’ perceived efficacy, combined with the persistent and upcoming economic hardships for ordinary Jordanians, has the potential to unsettle national political rhetoric. In the post-Arab Spring era that preceded the pandemic, there was a tendency among Jordanians – mainly tribal Jordanians – toward nationalist “right-wing” politics, which was adopted by populist Jordanian politicians15. This neo-tribal right-wing built its political narrative on grassroots economic and social grievances that are widely viewed to be the result of neoliberal development failures since the 2000s. The increasing inequality between the capital Amman and the other provinces, “the absence of the state,”16 and the feeling of weak political representation among Jordanians led them to call for a stronger presence of the state in their daily lives. However, the ruling elite espouse a strong current of neo-liberalism that alienates the Jordanian public. This tendency pushes some Jordanians to express nostalgia for the early days of the Kingdom where the military played the main role in building the state. With the military and PSD playing a central role in the successful containment of the coronavirus in Jordan, neo-right wing sympathizers may see this crisis as a validation exercise for their political platform. It is not unreasonable to believe that a worsening economy will drive more Jordanians into the populist camp and call for more military intervention in governance. It is important to note that there is no evidence that the populist agenda resonates with the coercive apparatus, but in the long run, this trend might lead to growing tensions between a populist citizenry and a political establishment beleaguered by low fiscal capacity and a deficit of public trust.
Data Appendix
Table A1: Timeline of COVID-19 Policy Instruments in Jordan
| Date | Event | Case Count |
| February 27, 2020 | Kingdom begins screening for COVID-19 at airports; two week quarantine for all positive cases. | 0 |
| March 2, 2020 | First positive case announced | 1 |
| March 15, 2020 | Schools closed | 12 |
| March 17, 2020 | Borders closed; National Defense Law 13 of 1992 implemented | 48 |
| March 19, 2020 | Government declares State of Emergency | 69 |
| March 21, 2020 | General curfew imposed; all stores closed (Defense Order 2) | 99 |
| March 25, 2020 | Citizens permitted to walk to grocery stores and pharmacies | 172 |
| March 26, 2020 | Defense Order 3 imposes punishments (fines, jail, vehicle expropriation) for breaking Defense Order 2. | 212 |
| March 31, 2020 | Defense Order 4 establishes a national fund for donations to fight the pandemic. | 274 |
| April 1, 2020 | Defense Order 5 halts all judicial proceedings | 278 |
| April 8, 2020 | Defense Order 6 obliges employers to keep their employees and provides them with flexibility in wages payment. | 358 |
| April 9, 2020 | Announcing a full curfew for 48 hours (April 10 and 11) | 372 |
Table A2: Main Findings by Governorate
| Governorate | N | Coronavirus and Health | Economy | Implementation and Compliance | |||
| Do you know anyone in your area who is a COVID-19 patient? | Do you think you have adequate access to health services if you should need them? (Yes) |
Income negatively impacted | Job lost due to curfew (of those who said they are currently unemployed, n=134) |
Do you know anyone who has been arrested for breaking curfew? | Who is responsible for implementing curfew in your area? | ||
| Irbid | 45 | 17.8% (8) |
86.7% (39) |
62.2% (28) |
42.1% (16) |
11.1%
(5) |
22.2% PSD17
73.3% Military |
| Tafila | 41 | 0% (0) |
82.9% (34) |
48.8% (20) |
44.8% (29) |
23.9%
12 |
70.7% PSD
24.4 Military |
| Amman | 25 | 4% (1) |
80% (20) |
64% (16) |
31.3% (5) |
28%
(7) |
80% PSD
16% Military |
| Az-Zarqa | 21 | 0%
(0) |
91.3% (21) |
60.9% (14) |
66.7% (10) |
30.4%
(7) |
52.17% PSD
39.13% Military |
| Al-Balqa | 13 | 0%
(0) |
100% (13) |
38.5% (5) |
(40%)
(4) |
23.1%
(3) |
53.9% PSD
30.8% Military |
| Al-Karak | 13 | 15.4% (13) |
100% (13) |
53.8% (7) |
22.2% (2) |
23.1%
(3) |
61.5% PSD
23.1% Military |
| Ajlun | 9 | 0%
(0) |
77.8% (7) |
55.6% (5) |
28.6% (2) |
44.4%
(4) |
66.7% PSD
22.2% Military |
| Al-Mafraq | 8 | 0%
(0) |
100% (8) |
50% (4) |
0%
0 |
12.5%
(1) |
37.5% PSD
50% Military |
| Low N- Governorates | |||||||
| Jerash | 4 | 0%
(0) |
75% (3) |
100% (4) |
100% (3) |
50% (2) |
100% PSD |
| Al-Aqaba | 3 | 0%
(0) |
100% (3) |
0% (0) |
0%
(0) |
66.7% PSD
33.3 Military |
|
| Madaba | 2 | 0%
(0) |
50% (1) |
50% (1) |
0% (0) |
0%
(0) |
50% PSD
50% Military |
| Maan | 2 | 50% (1) |
100% (2) |
100%
(2) |
0% (0) |
50% (0) |
50% PSD 50% Gendarmerie |
| Total | 188 | 6.4% (12) |
87.2% (164) |
58% (109) |
41% (55/134) |
23.9% (45) |
54.79% PSD 37.77% Military 2.13% Gendarmerie 1.60% Municipality 0.53% Area governor 3.19% Collective Effort |
Endnotes
- Jordan Ministry of Health (n.d.). ‘Coronavirus.’ Retrieved April 11, 2020, from https://corona.moh.gov.jo/a
- Goodman, L. A. (2011). Comment: On respondent-driven sampling and snowball sampling in hard-to-reach populations and snowball sampling not in hard-to-reach populations. Sociological Methodology, 41(1), 347-353
- Our response rates in the southern governorates of Ma’an (2) and Aqaba (3) and in the central governorates of Jerash (4) and Madaba (2) are too few to draw meaningful conclusions and so will be discussed mainly in aggregate figures for sectoral analyses. We present the findings for these governorates in Table 1 for completeness.
- Jordan Ministry of Health. (2018). Annual Statistical Report. Retrieved from https://www.moh.gov.jo/Pages/viewpage.aspx?pageID=185
- Al-Rjoub, Amer [Host]. (2020, March 18). Sarf al-rawatib wa dabat al-aswaaq [TV show]. In Al-Sawt al-Mamlaka. Amman, Jordan: al-Mamlaka News Channel. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhX0JOR3SJk
- Center for Strategic Studies. (2020) Work, Workers, and Living Conditions in Light of the Crisis and Lockdown. Retrieved from http://jcss.org/ShowNewsAr.aspx?NewsId=827
- World Bank Data. (2020, March 1). Unemployment, youth total (% of total labor force ages 15-24) (modeled ILO estimate) – Jordan. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.ZS?locations=JO
- Sobh, Barshar and Aburumman, Hussein. (2020, December). State of the Informal Economy in Jordan: Opportunities for Integration. Amman, Jordan: al-Quds Center for Political Studies. Retrieved from http://www.alqudscenter.org/index.php?l=en&pg=UFVCTElDQVRJT05T&catID=21&id=2391
- Gatti, Roberta, Diego F. Angel-Urdinola, Joana Silva, and Andras Bodor. (2014). Striving for better jobs: the challenge of informality in the Middle East and North Africa. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group. Retrieved from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/445141468275941540/Striving-for-better-jobs-the-challenge-of-informality-in-the-Middle-East-and-North-Africa
- Center for Strategic Studies. (2020) Work, Workers, and Living Conditions in Light of the Crisis and Lockdown. Retrieved from http://jcss.org/ShowNewsAr.aspx?NewsId=827
- Jordan TV. (2020, January 15). Statement of the Minister of Finance and Government Response to Discussion of the 2020 Budget [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms8i833Bt8U
- Jordan Ministry of Finance. (2020). Ministry of Finance Monthly Bulletin (February 2020). Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/r9vmd3l
- Hartnett, A.S. (2018, June 13).Can Jordan’s new prime minister reform the government? The Monkey Cage, Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/06/13/can-jordans-new-prime-minister-reform-the-government/
- No author. (2020, April 3). Security source: two MPs arrested violating the lockdown orders in the capital. al-Mamlaka News. https://tinyurl.com/wsy374j
- Jordan TV. (2020, January 14). Statement of MP Sadah al-Habashneh, Budgetary Committee [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgAqRufXTWc
- Roya News. (2017, August 9). Mohammad Arslan and Mansour al-Mualla: the prestige of the state and rule of law [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGkdZohZ8fI
- PSD is the main police force of Jordan