Yemen's economic collapse is not a side effect of the war — it is the war's most effective weapon against civilians. With GDP per capita down 58 percent since 2015, the country's 33 million people are caught between two competing monetary authorities, neither of which can deliver basic economic function. In Aden, the internationally recognised government's interim capital, a public-sector worker like Bushra Abdullah Abdulwarith earns 78,000 Yemeni riyals per month — roughly $50 at the black market rate. The World Food Programme estimates typical household food costs in government-held areas at 130,366 riyals ($83), meaning her salary covers only 60 percent of the food bill before rent, transport, or healthcare enter the picture. Her experience is not an outlier: WFP monitoring found 74 percent of households in accessible government-controlled areas unable to meet basic food needs as of early October. Marib, swollen with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, illustrates the compounding effect. Government employee Abu Mohammed Nasser al-Asbahi earns 400,000 riyals ($250) a month — a higher salary by Yemeni standards — but more than half disappears into rent alone, leaving his family dependent on credit from local shops before the first third of the month is over. Pharmacists report patients splitting prescribed medication doses or declining parts of treatment entirely because they cannot afford the full course. In Houthi-controlled Sanaa and the northwest, the crisis takes a different shape but arrives at the same destination. The Houthis have imposed strict monetary controls — banning newer government-printed banknotes and enforcing a largely fixed exchange rate — which creates surface-level currency stability. But public-sector workers have gone years without regular salaries, and those who receive payments get half-salaries at irregular intervals. The fixed rate does not generate purchasing power; it merely prevents the visible collapse of the riyal while cash shortages and transfer costs eat into what little money people have. The banking split itself functions as an extraction mechanism. Moving money between Houthi-held and government-held territory incurs additional costs, directly punishing the families who depend on domestic and international remittances. The government's May 2024 decision to approve a 20 percent cost-of-living allowance calculated on base salary rather than total pay delivered what Bushra described as 'a temporary painkiller that does not reflect the scale of the actual pressure.' Across both zones, the pattern is identical: retailers report collapsing demand for anything beyond the cheapest staples, credit purchases are replacing cash, and households have eliminated all non-essential spending. The war has produced a perverse equilibrium in which neither side can govern effectively but both can extract from the population. The government cannot pay its workers a living wage or restart oil exports. The Houthis cannot circulate enough cash or generate employment. Both maintain enough control to tax, levy, and restrict economic movement across their respective territories. The civilians in between are not collateral damage — they are the resource being mined.
