The Palestinian economy and the PA have been faced over the past ten years with a number of challenges: providing adequate education, housing, health care, and employment opportunities for a young and fast-growing population; building a Palestinian public administration, where none existed prior to 1994, which can deliver those services; and undertaking these tasks while still under occupation and the severe restrictions it imposes in an unstable and unpredictable political, economic, and social environment. Economic crises followed the imposition of