Freedom, agency and material conditions: human development in MENA
Conventional approaches to measuring human development, which are primarily centred on income, health and education, provide an incomplete assessment of people’s opportunities to improve their lives. As this column explains, it is essential to understand how institutional and social environments influence individuals’ agency over their development outcomes. Analysis of the diverse recent experiences of Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia illustrates how such an approach can inform policy-making.
Trust in Lebanon’s public institutions: a challenge for the new leadership
Lebanon’s new leadership confronts daunting economic challenges amid geopolitical tensions across the wider region. As this column explains, understanding what has happened over the past decade to citizens’ trust in key public institutions – parliament, the government and the armed forces – will be a crucial part of the policy response.
Rising influence: women’s empowerment within Arab households
In 2016 and again in 2022, a reliable poll of public opinion in the Arab world asked respondents in seven countries whether they agreed with the statement that ‘a man should have final say in all decisions concerning the family’. As this column reports, the changing balance of responses between the two surveys gives an indication of whether there been progress in the distribution of decision-making within households towards greater empowerment of women.
Poverty and plutonomy: measuring extreme bipolarisation in the Arab world
Inequality in the Arab world is not just a question of extreme poverty or extreme affluence: it’s about both. This column presents research that uses the lenses of both poverty analysis and plutonomy analysis to capture the extreme polarisation between the poor, who suffer from exclusion and deprivation, and the ultra-wealthy, who wield immense power over economic and political systems.
Shifting public trust in governments across the Arab world
The Arab Spring, which began over a decade ago, was driven by popular distrust in governments of the region. The column reports on how public trust has shifted since then, drawing on survey data collected soon after the uprising and ten years later. The findings reveal a dynamic and often fragile landscape of trust in Arab governments from the early 2010s to the early 2020s. Growing distrust across many countries should raise concerns about future political and social instability.
Freedom: the missing piece in analysis of multidimensional wellbeing
Political philosophy has long emphasised the importance of freedom in shaping a meaningful life, yet it is consistently overlooked in assessments of human wellbeing across multiple dimensions. This column focuses on the freedom to express opinions, noting that it is shaped by both formal laws and informal social dynamics, fluctuating with the changing cultural context, particularly in the age of social media. Data on public opinion in Arab countries over the past decade are revealing about how this key freedom is perceived.
Child stunting in Tunisia: an alarming rise
Child stunting in Tunisia seemed to have fallen significantly over the past two decades. But as this column reports, new analysis indicates that the positive trend has now gone dramatically into reverse. Indeed, the evidence is unequivocal: the nutritional health of the country’s youngest citizens is rapidly deteriorating and requires immediate and decisive action.
Happiness in the Arab world: should we be concerned?
Several Arab countries have low rankings in the latest comparative assessment of average happiness across the world. But as this column explains, the average is not a reliable summary statistic when applied to ordinal data. The evidence from more robust analysis of socio-economic inequality in happiness suggests that policy-makers should be less concerned about happiness indicators than the core development objective of more equitable social conditions for citizens.
Measuring poverty in Lebanon in the time of economic collapse
What has been the impact of Lebanon’s long-running economic crisis on the daily lives of citizens? This column documents a sharp increase in absolute poverty starting in 2019. Having at least three poor people out of every five residents of the country is a clear signal of the emergency of the situation.
Tackling Lebanon’s fiscal crisis: should food subsidies be eliminated?
Is elimination of food subsidies the right policy to address Lebanon's public finance crisis? This column reports research that uses information from consumer surveys to identify potential alternatives to such a policy. The evidence suggests that elimination of food subsidies is the worst possible option for policy-makers.
Arab countries are caught in an inequality trap
Conventional wisdom, based mainly on surveyed household income distribution statistics, suggests that inequality is generally low in Arab countries. At the same time, little attention has been devoted to social inequalities, whether in terms of outcomes or opportunities. This column introduces a forthcoming report, which offers a different narrative: based on the largest research project on the subject to date and covering 12 Arab countries, the authors argue that the region is caught in an inequality trap.
Subsidy reforms and social justice: lessons from Egypt
For institutional and historical reasons, countries of the Middle East and North Africa have relied mostly on consumption subsidies for reducing inequality. This column presents evidence on the distributional impact of recent subsidy reforms in Egypt.