Where the margins are not
There is a well-known idea in labour economics called the added worker effect. When one earner loses their job, someone else in the household goes out and finds work. It has been documented in many countries and it is one of the ordinary ways families absorb a shock.
Reading the West Bank data with that idea in mind is a useful corrective, because it shows how much the theory assumes about the market a household is responding into.
Start with what a household would be responding into. Employment among West Bank women aged 18 to 59 ran at 17.1 per cent in the two years before October 2023. Among people aged 15 to 24 it was 25.9 per cent. These are among the lowest participation rates recorded anywhere, and they were the position before anything happened.
After the shock, neither rose. Women's employment is 15.2 per cent across 2024 and 2025, youth employment 19.1 per cent. Both fell.
That is the part worth sitting with. The added worker effect requires jobs to exist for the added worker to take. In an economy where the ILO records GDP down 17.1 per cent and construction value added down 45 per cent, and where female participation was already under one in five, the margin the theory relies on is close to absent.
Households facing a loss of income had very little to adjust with.
One series did hold
School attendance among 15 to 22 year olds was 61.4 per cent before and 61.3 per cent after. Whatever else changed, families did not respond by taking their children out of education, at least not in the first two years.
That is the most encouraging number in the whole dataset, and it is the one I would most want to check again in five years, because the cost of an interrupted education tends to show up long after the interruption.
Figures are descriptive calculations from the public PCBS Labour Force Survey. GDP and construction figures from the ILO.
