Defying the Average in the Arab World
| Author | Hossein Askari |
| Position | Iran Professor of International Business and International Affairs George Washington University |
| Pages | 50 |
Page 50
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C., 2007, 350 pp., $24.95 (paper).
In The Arab Economies in a Changing World, Marcus Noland and Howard Pack examine the economic performance and prospects of 10 Arab countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, and the Republic of Yemen. The presumption is that "Arabism" affords a signifi cant degree of homogeneity to compare economic performance and prospects. As someone who wrote a book in 1976 on the region that stretches from Morocco to the Islamic Republic of Iran, I can say that the "Arab" region affords little homogeneity. I found the same to be true in 1997 in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. These countries did not afford the hoped-for homogeneity (Saudi Arabia and Bahrain can hardly be compared). Later, in 2006, I felt that maybe the oil exporters of the Persian Gulf represented the best indicator of homogeneity, but even this has its limitations. Noland and Pack have silently arrived at a similar conclusion that their countries are too varied to afford neat generalizations.
The main conclusions of this book are that (1) although most of these countries have achieved signifi cant success according to social indicators, their economic performance has been average; (2) the reasons for their economic performance vary; (3) the contributing factors are bad institutions (high degree of corruption, lack of cross-border integration, limited application of technology and innovation, belowaverage education and skill enhancement, and so on), authoritarian rule, political uncertainty, and large government sectors; and (4) in the case of the oil-exporting countries, oil has created special opportunities and pitfalls. In summary, the authors conclude that "at issue is not the extent of past achievements, . . . but rather whether the existing economic and political models . . . are adequate to successfully address the current demographically driven pressure to deliver jobs. . . . The answer is almost surely no."
While their analysis is thoughtful and highly significant, I have some differences with the authors. For instance, the authors shortchange the importance of women's labor force participation in future unemployment.
Also, because of the...
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