Social Protection as a Tool for Economic Development in Syria: A Critical Reading of Wage Reform and Price Liberalization Policies During the Transitional Period (2025–2026)

Syria's transitional period (2025–2026) has combined an unprecedented wage-reform sequence with sweeping price liberalization, producing a paradox central to this paper: nominal wages have risen sharply through successive decrees, yet the purchasing-power gap between top-tier and ordinary public employees has widened to 6–20 times, while poverty affects roughly 90 percent of the population and extreme poverty 66 percent. Using a mixed-methods design that combines decree-by-decree fiscal analysis, a 7,120-household field survey across fourteen governorates, and comparative case analysis (Rwanda, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen), the paper argues that wage reform and price liberalization, absent a needs-based social protection architecture, function as a mechanism of elite-loyalty rent distribution rather than broad-based welfare improvement. Drawing on the Transformative Social Protection framework and the Limited Access Orders theory, the analysis shows that the current sequencing violates the concurrency conditions the IMF reform-sequencing literature identifies as necessary for successful subsidy and price reform. The paper concludes with a three-phase roadmap — emergency stabilization, scaled conditional transfers linked to reconstruction employment, and an institutionalized social protection floor — designed to reorient Syria's transition toward needs-based rather than status-based targeting, at a moment when sanctions relief, an estimated $14 billion in regional investment inflows, and international re-engagement create a genuine window for reform.