Neoliberal Transformation and the Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

By the lights of the international financial institutions, Tunisia and Egypt were the celebrated success stories of the Washington Consensus, or neoliberal reform, in the Arab Mediterranean and participated fully in the worldwide economic boom of the 2000-2008 period. Neoliberalism promised to shrink government and promote private enterprise as the engine of growth and new job creation. While fewer resources were provided to public investment and services like health and education, private investment did not fully compensate, even as most benefits of growth, liberalization and privatization were concentrated in the hands of a class of crony capitalists led by the ruling families. Throughout the 2000s, the underside of neoliberal growth became more glaring, including capital flight, the limited contributions of FDI and open trade to domestic development, growing regional disparities, multidimensional poverty, multidimensional inequality, and malfunctions of the labor market. Social movements grew in opposition to this neoliberal polity and economy among both the middle and working classes. When the economic crisis of 2008-2010 caused a slowdown in economic growth and aggravated unemployment and poverty, the opposition movements grew stronger and more interconnected. To hold power, the ruling elite intensified electoral fraud and the often-brutal repression of opposition movements. The final insult was the maneuvering by the ruling families to convert their presidential systems to dynastic rule. By the end of 2010, these forces converged into a perfect storm that led to the overthrow of Presidents Ben Ali and Mubarak

Gulf Arab Financial Flows and Investment, 2000-2010: Promises, Process and Prospects in the MENA Region

The Gulf Arab countries were promoted as dynamic, rapidly growing and self-transforming economies in the boom years of the 2000s, and were praised for their purported leadership of the MENA regional economy. As of 2010, despite the severity of the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 in the Gulf and consequent impact on the rest of the region, the GCC countries were still promoted as potential leaders of both the recovery and future regional development. An examination of the evidence regarding the direction, magnitude and uses of GCC financial flows both domestically and internationally from 2000 to 2010 finds that the investment programs in place in the boom years provided outcomes that only weakly fulfilled these promises and that they barely fulfilled them at all during the economic crisis and recovery. The author’s assessment is that GCC-sourced investment since 2008 mainly addressed the Gulf region’s internal development project, although even that seemed dependent on continued high levels of hydrocarbon revenues, and did little to demonstrate the promised leadership of the regional economy by the GCC

Islam and Labor Law: Some Precepts and Examples

Labor law officially defines relationships between employers and employees and the formal constraints under which each group operates, such as how much leeway managers have in hiring and firing employees, and how much freedom workers have to organize collectively. These relations are at the core of the productive processes that sustain society. Further, through the presence or absence of specific codes regulating the employment of women and children, labor legislation provides clues to the economic underpinnings of gender and family relations within a country. In reality, the codes may not be fully enforced, or may be enforced selectively by sector or firm size. By the same token, certain unmodified laws may operate in practice. However, the formal legislation serves as an indication of the image a government seeks to project to its own citizens and to the international community. This paper explores the range of ways in which Islamists define the capital-labor relationship, how those interpretations have influenced the prevailing labor legislation in countries ruled by explicitly “Islamic” regimes, and what influence Islamist movements might have on labor law in predominantly Muslim countries where secular governments now rule

Economic Reform and Privatization in Egypt

Egypt’s economic history from the abdication of King Farouk in 1952 to the abdication of Husni Mubarak in 2011 can be divided into three grand stages: the era of state-led development, the gradual erosion of state-led development, and the blossoming of neoliberalism. The period from 2008 to the present (July 2011), that is, from global financial crisis and recession to fragile recovery, may be a fourth stage—entailing at least the erosion of neoliberalism and, perhaps, the beginning of an era of more balanced growth with a more equitable distribution of benefits

Shifting Courses: Economies of the Maghreb after 2011

Chapter Four of the book: The Lure of Authoritarianism: The Maghreb after the Arab Spring Stephen King and Abdeslam Maghraoui, eds. Indiana University Pres