The Place of Opportunity: Community and Individual Determinants of Economic Hardship among Jews and Arabs in Israel

Alisa Lewin, University of Haifa
Haya Stier, Tel Aviv University
Daphna Caspi-Dror, Tel Aviv University

Israel is geographically segregated: Only eight urban localities are ethnically mixed, accounting for 8.6 % of the country's Arab population. Overall, Arab communities suffer discrimination in resource allocation, investment in infrastructure, and economic development, and have high poverty rates. Most Arab communities are relatively small and located in the periphery, far from large urban centers and have limited employment opportunities. Data from Israel’s 1995 Census, conducted by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, are combined with information from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics special publication on localities. The relative importance of community-level and household-level characteristics as determinants of household poverty, and the ways in which community characteristics mediate the effect of household-level characteristics on economic wellbeing are explored using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). Preliminary findings confirm that characteristics of both household and locality are related to economic hardship, and thus, both have implications for social policy.