Name: Why Yemen is Dying & Oman is Booming
Uploaded: 2026-03-20T17:05:50.000Z
Duration: 44 min 4 s
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When you gaze out across a map of the world, there are few other countries you'll see on it that appear to be more twin like than the duo of Yemen and Oman.

Adverbs of manner

Both countries roughly evenly divide the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula between them.

Adverbs of degree

They each have a very similar looking shape, and

they're even of very similar sizes, with Yemen being only slightly larger at around the same size as France, while Oman is around the same size as Italy.

Neither of them have any permanent rivers flowing in their territory, with both of them being restricted only to seasonal streams known in Arabic as wadis.

And yet, despite having no permanent rivers, they also both occupy the two rainiest locations that can be found on the Arabian Peninsula in their upper height island regions.

Although the rainfall levels seen in Yemen are considerably higher than those found in Oman.

And in addition to their similar rainfall levels and similar mountainous and desert topography, they both contain similar amounts of geological resources as well.

Both countries have a very comparable amount of proven oil and gas reserves, with Oman only having slightly more of each.

And both countries occupy strategically important territory that positions themselves at the gates of extremely important global maritime trade routes.

Oman controls the valuable territory directly on the southern edge of the Strait of Hormuz that funnels trade routes between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, while Yemen controls the similarly valuable territory on the eastern side of the Bab El Mandev Strait, which funnels trade routes between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.

Which gives both Yemen and Oman a degree of immense geopolitical leverage, owing to the spaces on the board that they each occupy.

Both countries are inhabited by ethnic Arabs who share a similar language and culture, and

both countries overwhelmingly follow the Islamic faith.

Sunni Islam is the dominant branch of the faith in each today.

In terms of raw numbers of followers, though, Yemen is home to a very significant Zaidi Shia minority, while Oman is home to a very significant Ibadi minority that has traditionally ruled the country, and

which is often considered to be a completely separate branch of the Islamic faith from the more well known Sunni and the Shia.

There are a lot of similarities between Yemen and Oman, not least of which is their shared border that runs for 183 miles, or 294 kilometers.

And yet, despite all of their similarities and neighboring locations on the map, there are perhaps no other two bordering countries in the entire world today who experience such radically different realities.

Today in the 21st century, Yemen is these days most well known for being essentially the poster child of a failed state.

The country has been locked in a devastating civil war for a decade now, ever since 2014 that still doesn't see any end in sight and which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people just last month.

In March of 2024, the United nations still described Yemen as experiencing one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world, with millions of people remaining forcibly displaced from their homes and with roughly 6 million people remaining on the brink of famine.

In reality, Yemen ceased being a functioning country years ago and is more of a geographic expression these days than a real country.

Yemen's territory is still divided between multiple different factions and warlords supported by various different outside powers.

And many of these factions in control of Yemen's territory are widely recognized internationally as terrorist organizations, such as the Houthis, who control most of the country's population centers and are considered a terrorist organization by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and the United States.

And there's also Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or acap, who also control significant territory and is widely considered a terrorist organization by dozens of countries all around the world.

Within the past decade alone, Yemen's territory has been bombed by foreign countries from all around the world, and

it remains one of the most deeply dangerous and troubled countries on the planet.

The Human Development Index, or hdi, is a composite index that combines scores in a country's per capita income, access to education, and

access to healthcare to figure out a score between 0 at the lowest and 1 at the highest.

Yemen's 2023 HDI score clocked in at an abysmal 0.424, which is literally the 8th lowest score in the entire world, and

by far the lowest that can be anywhere in the world outside of Sub Saharan Africa.

And most Sub Saharan African nations are actually doing better than Yemen is, according to the hdi.

And on top of the abysmal HDI score, Yemen also ranks near the very bottom on the annual Corruption perceptions index for 2023 as well, having come in as the fifth most corrupt country in the entire world, somehow even beating out the corruption score for North Korea.

Yemen also has one of the lowest levels of GDP per capita in the world, one of the highest levels of poverty in the world, one of the lowest levels of literacy in the world, especially for Yemeni women, and

a whole host of other problems that are genuinely just far too many to even count.

Meanwhile, Oman, just right next door across the border, couldn't possibly be any more different.

Oman hasn't seen a war fought in its territory for decades, since the 1970s.

Oman's 2023 HDI score stands at an impressive 0.819, which is a massive difference between them and Yemen of 0.395 basis points.

To put that chasm of a difference in a further perspective, Oman's HDI score is roughly equivalent to Romania, while Yemen's is roughly equivalent to Mali.

So imagine if Mali and Romania shared a border between each other.

This difference is significantly larger than even the much discussed HDI difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, who share the same island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean.

And it's probably a larger gap than even the difference in HDI between North Korea and South Korea.

In fact, the difference in HDI score across the border from Yemen to Oman is the second largest HDI disparity between any two borders in the entire world.

And it remains only just slightly behind the even larger difference in HDI score across Yemen's other border into Saudi Arabia.

There is literally nowhere else on the planet that has as stark of a difference in HDI score immediately across borders as between Yemen and its two neighbors.

And it's not just the HDI score that Oman exceeds cells over.

Yemen with the nominal GDP per capita in Oman is currently a whopping 34 times higher than it is in Yemen, with Yemen's being the ninth lowest in the entire world and Oman's being roughly equivalent to Hungary.

Despite Yemen's population being significantly higher than Oman's, and

despite Yemen's control of the most agriculturally fertile land in the Arabian Peninsula and its roughly similar amount of oil and gas resources as Oman, Oman's economy is still more than five times larger than Yemen's island.

Oman's score on the Corruption Perceptions Index is about on a par with Italy, which is much, much better than being the fifth lowest in the entire world.

And the list of differences really just continues to go on from there.

Oman is ultimately a stable, prosperous, wealthy and healthy nation that is notably ruled by one of the very few absolute monarchies remaining in the 21st century, while Yemen is basically an apocalyptic nightmare right next door across the border.

So how did this massive divergence between two otherwise similar looking countries develop into the way it is today?

And it begins with the slight but notable differences between each of their geographies.

A very important component of both of these countries geographies are their mountains that separate their interiors from their coastlines.

In the case of Yemen, their more isolated mountainous highlands enabled the Zahidi Shia Muslim movement to emerge as a distinct religious identity in a region otherwise dominated by the Sunni branch of Islam.

While in Oman, the presence of the country's northern mountain chain separates the interior region from a more narrow band of coastal plains immediately butting up against the Arabian Sea.

It was within this isolated coastal plain, geographically separated from the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle east, that a unique Islamic identity took hold that became known as Ibadism, a branch of Islam that is often regarded as being distinctly separate from the larger and more well known Sunni and Shia branches.

The Ibadis, secure in their isolated coastal plain, here developed around the port city of Muscat.

And because of their easy access to global maritime trade routes out into the Indian Ocean, they became more commercially focused, outward looking and cosmopolitan in nature, which has influenced the Abadi sect's outlook on religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence with other beliefs for centuries now.

The interior of Oman, conversely, grew to become more inward looking, theocratic and fundamentalist in nature, not too dissimilar to the pattern seen in modern day Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

In Yemen, the southern coastal areas on the Gulf of Aden grew to also become more outward looking, trade oriented and secular, while the interior mountainous highlands home to the Zaidi Shia movement, grew to become more inward looking and theocratic.

Just as in Saudi Arabia, where the coasts were more cosmopolitan and the interior around modern day Riyadh was the birthplace of the modern day ultra conservative Wahhabi movement in Sunni Islam.

So Yemen and Oman both struggled for centuries with this difference in geography and outlook between their coastal populations and interior populations.

While Yemen's northwestern mountains receive many times more rainfall than anywhere else in Oman or in the Arabian Peninsula, as a result, these mountainous parts of northwestern Yemen are the most agriculturally productive in the Arabian Peninsula anywhere outside of Iraq.

And so they've always been the most densely populated part of Arabia for thousands of years as well.

Yemen's agricultural potential is many times higher than that of Oman's, and

as a result, Yemen has always had the greater population between them.

Even today, Yemen's 2024 population has nearly 35 million people, while Oman has fewer than 5 million, meaning that Yemen has roughly seven times the population of Oman.

But Yemen's much larger population base carries with it certain challenges that have been absent in Oman in the late 20th century, when large oil and gas reserves were discovered across both of them.

It turned out that each had pretty similar amounts, though Oman's were slightly larger.

Oman's greatest inherent advantage, however, was that its slightly larger amount of oil and gas reserves were always going to be able to go much further in the way of directly benefiting its much smaller population.

It was Always going to be easier to have.

These similar amounts of oil and gas resources benefit the population of Oman.

That's just one seventh of the size of the population in Yemen.

And Yemen's population is only expected to continue growing further and further beyond Omans, because as the two countries development destinies diverged radically, so too did each of their fertility rates.

Even though Yemen's fertility rate has been continually declining since the late 1980s, it is still today, as of 2023, one of the highest seen anywhere in the world.

The average Yemeni woman continues to have 3.6 children during her lifetime.

Conversely, Oman's fertility rate has also continually declined since the early 1980s, but

at a much faster pace than Yemen's, to the point where today the average Omani woman only has 2.5 children.

Meaning that with its much larger population base and much higher fertility rate, Yemen's population is going to continue growing multiple times larger than Oman's will by the midpoint of the century.

In 2050, Yemen's population is currently projected to reach a staggering 60 million people, while Oman's isn't projected to grow much further than 6 million people.

Meaning that by then the Yemeni population will be about 10 times larger than Oman's will be.

Which simply means that Yemen's limited resources will continue being spread out more thinly than Oman's will have to be.

In addition to geographic and demographic differences between the two, there are also very notable historical differences between the two that explain a lot of the current divergence between them as well.

Both countries were conquered or colonized by non Arab powers in the 16th century.

The Ottoman Turks took over most of northern Yemen in 1519 and would control it for the next 400 years until the end of World War I.

While the Portuguese took over most of modern day Oman in 1507, just a few years before the Ottomans took over northern Yemen.

But the people around Muscat in modern day Oman managed to push out their foreign occupiers much, much earlier than the Yemenis did.

The Portuguese only stayed around in Oman for about a century and a half until 1650, when local Omani tribes from the interior region managed to push them out and take over Muscat, after which they declared the new Sultanate of Oman.

This makes modern Oman the oldest continuously independent state in the Arab world today, having remained largely independent ever since then, right up until the modern day.

From there, the Omanis utilized their centuries of previous ship and trade experience and everything they learned from the Portuguese to then pursue the Portuguese empire across the rest of the Indian Ocean.

And in the process, the Omanis created a vast maritime empire of their own that at times dominated much of the Arabian Sea and controlled overseas territories in modern day Iran, Pakistan, India, and

all across eastern Africa, including the strategically important trade hub of Zanzibar.

The sprawling Omani empire was eventually partitioned in 1856 between the Northern holdings based around modern day Oman, and

the southern holdings based around Zanzibar in Africa.

And so the northern half became known as the Sultanate of Muscat in Oman.

Essentially ruled by a more secular sultan in the coastal plain around Muscat and a more theocratic imam in the interior region, Muscat in Oman eventually became a de facto British protectorate in 1872, but