ABSTRACT
This chapter provides details of the way in which urban development is taking place throughout the Middle East. It also provides details of populations of individual Middle Eastern countries since 1946, together with the total population quoted in, and the date of, the latest census in each state. The United Nations definition of urban included settlements which, though urban, probably derived much of their livelihood from a rural hinterland. The primacy of individual cities within national population patterns has long been the subject of interest to demographers, because, for many states, the degree of concentration of population and economic activity in the chief urban settlement has been a measure of the developing problems of overconcentration of national wealth. The issues of various types of population change against economic status have been subjected to a Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation test which measures the degree of association between two groups of rank orders.
