[Berkley]

This article suggests another reason for the proliferation of inexpensive jambiyas:

The number of jambiya thefts has been greater this year than ever before, said Abdul-Salaam al-Shibami of the Sana’a police department in Bab al-Yemen.*...In recent years, people have started avoiding dressing up with a nice jambiya, for fear of experiencing such an incident.* Costly jambiyas are generally worn only on special occasions, not in daily life. Ateeq Abdullah Mis’ead, head of a tribe in Dhammar, says that in the past, as well as in some places today, people base their respect for each other on the kind of jambiyas they wear.* In those days, said Mis’ead, your value depended on the value of the jambiya you were wearing. “If you wore an expensive jambiya, you were considered a big man, and people would respect you more than they would the average person. The jambiya had great value to it in the past,” Mis’ead said. “Today it is the opposite—people avoid wearing pricey jambiyas, fearing that it could bring them more bad than good, and could even be life threatening.”....According to the latest World Bank Report, 42 percent of Yemen’s 21 million people live under the U.S. $2 per day, which means that it would take one year and a half of work for an average Yemeni to earn the cost of a jambiya.* Moreover, the most encouraging factor for jambiya thieves is that jambiyas are very easy to sell, and the prices are known, and demand for expensive jambiya’s is higher than ever.* “All thieves’ have to do is walk into a jambiya shop with an I.D. and they can sell it in minutes. In Old Sana’a, there are over 30 jambiya shops and all the shops wait anxiously for people trying to sell their jambiyas.