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  It takes all the neoliberal complacency of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto to be able to claim that Bouazizi sacrificed himself for the cause of the “free market.” According to de Soto, “the forces of the market have come to the Arab world—even if governments didn’t invite them in. Political leaders must realize that, since Bouazizi went up in flames and his peers rose in protest, poor Arabs are no longer outside but inside, in the market, right next to them.”26 The outrageousness of neoliberal dogmatism defies the imagination; the suggestion is that to satisfy the “poor Arabs,” one need only simplify administrative procedures and make it easier to get microcredits. One is reminded of the “Great Princess” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, who, informed “that the peasants did not have bread, replied: Let them eat cake.”

  FIGURE 1.6 Informality in labor force and employment (%) (latest available figures in 2011). (Source: Gatti et al.)

  Yet the fact remains that the so-called informal sector—“informal” because it is not subject to state regulation—is, overall, smaller in Arab countries than in other developing regions in Asia and Africa, even if it accounts for a sizable proportion of those countries’ labor force and total employment (Fig. 1.6).

  It should, however, be noted that the proportion of the labor force not covered by any form of social insurance varies considerably from one Arab country to another, depending on the nature of the state and its socioeconomic regime. The overall proportion of those not covered in the region is driven downward by the remarkably low average of 6.4% of the economically active in the six very tightly controlled oil monarchies of the GCC; here undeclared work is a negligible phenomenon (compare the 8.9% average in developed countries). For the remaining Arab countries, the proportions range from 34.5% in Libya, 44.5% in Egypt, and 49.9% in Tunisia, through 63.3% in Algeria, 66.9% in Lebanon, and 67.2% in Jordan, to 80.1% in Morocco and 82.6% in Syria and peaking at 90% in Yemen.27 As for the proportion of the self-employed (above all, peasants and craftspeople) in the active labor force outside the GCC states, where that, too, is very low (6.2%), the disparities between Arab states are smaller, varying between Tunisia’s 24.7% and Syria’s 35.8% (33.2% in Yemen).28

  A recently published World Bank study of the informal sector in MENA emphasizes the positive correlation between informal labor and poverty, even hazarding the paradoxical formulation: “those who can afford to be unemployed, i.e. those who are relatively better off.”29 The study likewise points out the correlation between informal labor and low levels of education, noting that the better educated generally find work in the public sector or the most productive private enterprises30 when they do not swell the ranks of those seeking employment. Paradoxically, the fact that income and educational levels are higher in the Middle East and North Africa than in the other developing regions of Asia and Africa is responsible for MENA’s significantly higher unemployment rates (Fig. 1.7).

  FIGURE 1.7 Unemployment rate (%). (Source: ILO)

  These figures, however, offer a very pale reflection of the realities of unemployment and underemployment in MENA. In line with prevailing definitions, the statistics of the International Labour Organization (ILO) treat as “employed” all people old enough to work (15 or above) who, during a brief reference period, such as a week or a day, “performed some work,” if only for an hour, in exchange for a wage or salary in cash or in kind or for profit or family gain in cash or in kind.31 In other words, both individuals underemployed to various degrees and the hidden unemployed who, for lack of salaried employment, join the ranks of the informal sector’s “self-employed” in order to survive, fall into the category of the “employed” in this organization’s tables and charts.

  As for the unemployed, they are, by ILO definition, people “seeking work.”32 This criterion is, however, a very fuzzy one in countries where it is impossible to keep count of those hunting for a job, since the unemployed are not systematically registered. In reality, the official MENA unemployment figures basically reflect the proportion of those looking for work who fall into this category on a rigid interpretation of ILO criteria. As is the case everywhere else as well, these unemployment figures exclude the mass of people who have renounced looking for a job because they have no hope of finding one and who are accordingly relegated to the ranks of the “inactive.” In sum, the official MENA unemployment figures by no means accurately reflect the real situation, as observers on the ground agree.

  The negative socioeconomic impact of these unemployment figures is heightened by the fact that Arab countries are vying with sub-Saharan Africa for the unenviable distinction of occupying last place in the international ranking of countries’ social unemployment coverage: in the Arab states, 97.8% of the unemployed receive no allocations at all (the corresponding figure for sub-Saharan Africa is 99.3%). In fact, in most Arab states, 100% of the unemployed receive no unemployment benefit at all; the sole exceptions before 2011 were Algeria (where the proportion was 96.1%), Tunisia (97%), Bahrain (65.8%), and Egypt (the figure is not available, but probably close to 100%).33

  Emigration long functioned as a safety valve that made it possible to absorb a large proportion of regional unemployment. Since the 1960s, however, its effectiveness in this regard has appreciably diminished since the population explosion of recent decades coincided with restrictions on immigration to Europe imposed as a result of the crisis of the 1970s, the saturation of the effects of the two oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s on immigration to the GCC countries, and the competition offered by South Asian immigration to the GCC. Thus the percentage of total MENA emigrants to total MENA population decreased from 9.5% in 1960 to 3.4% at the beginning of the first decade of this century: from 14.5% to 5.5% for North Africa (13% to 5.7% for Tunisia) and from 9.3% to 3.3% for the Arab countries of the Middle East (8.1% to 3.3% for Egypt and 8.7% to 2.4% for Syria).34

  With the economic crisis in the West and the political upheavals in Arab countries, this safety valve has largely been closed. As for the contribution to GDP that emigrants’ remittances represent, it varies considerably from one Arab country to the next. In 2004, it was the highest in Lebanon (25.7%, where, however, it was offset by remittances, totaling 19.5% of GDP, made by workers who had immigrated to Lebanon), followed by Jordan (20.4%), the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza (15.5%), Yemen (9.3%), and Morocco (8.4%). It was under 5% in Tunisia (4.9%), Egypt (4.3%), and Syria (3.5%).35

  FIGURE 1.8 Unemployment rate youth and adults (%). (Source: ILO)

  YOUTH UNDEREMPLOYMENT

  A major distinguishing feature of MENA unemployment is that the percentage of those seeking work is substantially higher among the “youth” (in ILO statistics, “youths” are people between 15 and 24 years of age) than among “adults” (people over 24), as is attested by the figures for 2010 (Fig. 1.8). Youth unemployment thus contributes massively to driving the overall rate upward.

  Unemployment rates, it should be noted, exclusively concern the “labor force,” defined as all those who have jobs or are looking for them. Thus these rates ignore not only young people who are not seeking employment because their social situation allows them to pursue their education, but also the large number of those who in reality need to find work but have become discouraged or resigned. World Bank researchers seem to have recently discovered this banal and all but self-evident truth, judging from a January 2011 report by the organization’s Arab World Initiative: the report ingenuously declares that the actual number of unemployed youths in the region “could be much higher [than reported]. Many young people who are out of school and out of work are not reflected in the statistics because they are not looking for work.”36

  This explains why the labor force participation rate, which measures the “labor force” as a percentage of the total population, was in the Middle East in 2010 only 30.3% for young people between 15 and 24, and in North Africa only 33.6%. The corresponding figures in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia were 41.3%, 53.6%, and 60.3% respe
ctively. This confirms that the rate of unemployed youth in MENA is exceptionally high.37

  FIGURE 1.9 Youth in total population, 2010 (%). (Source: US Census Bureau)

  Yet contrary to a pervasive notion very often held out as a key to explaining the “Arab Spring,” MENA societies are not particularly young compared with the world’s other developing regions. More precisely, they are no longer especially young. They are, today, still younger than East Asian societies but scarcely younger than societies in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia and only just younger than those in Southeast Asia, as is shown by the percentage of young people under 25 or under 30 in these regions today (Fig. 1.9). As for the proportion of adolescents (10 to 19 years of age) in the general population, it was 20% in MENA in 2010, that is to say, equal to the corresponding figure for South Asia and lower than the one for sub-Saharan Africa (23%).38

  Thus the MENA youth unemployment rate is plainly exceptional, and a broad-based age pyramid is not the sole explanation for this, as proponents of the Youth Bulge theory would like to believe.39 Formulated in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) circles, this rather unoriginal theory purports to explain how conflicts originate. Graham Fuller appealed to it in a paper presented at a 1993 conference organized by the CIA’s Geographic Resources Division.40 His thesis was subsequently taken up and popularized by Samuel Huntington in his all too well-known The Clash of Civilizations, which cites Fuller.41 Since then, it has been cast in outrageously systematic form by the controversial German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, notably in a 2003 work that has become a best seller in his country and a handful of others.42

  In an essay published in 2003, Fuller develops his thesis with respect to the Middle East, his area of expertise.43 However, like a number of other writings disseminated by the CIA since the 1990s that fall back on the same thesis to explain zones of sociopolitical turbulence, his essay attributes unrest and violence not to the high percentage of young people in and of itself, but to the absence of mechanisms for the political and economic absorption of this “bulging” youth population. According to Fuller and his cothinkers’ analysis, it is for reasons of this kind that demographic explosions are transformed into political explosions. The palliatives and remedies prescribed by Fuller himself, as well as by other researchers working for the CIA, turn on political liberalization, democratization of the societies involved, educational reform, and birth control. These measures do not challenge, at least not directly, the economic and social order or dependency on Western powers. They aim, rather, to preserve them in the long term.

  Heinsohn’s provocative thesis, in contrast, is unabashedly reactionary. In his estimation, young people tend to become rebellious as their socioeconomic level rises, so the West would be well advised to stop subsidizing the populations in question and fostering, by the same stroke, their demographic growth. Thus Heinsohn cold-bloodedly advocated, in a Wall Street Journal piece published during the Israeli forces’ intensive bombardment of Gaza in January 2009, that the Western states stop contributing to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949 to provide relief for Palestinian refugees.44

  Heinsohn’s thesis is as simplistic as it is wrongheaded. By his reckoning, propensity to violence in a given society is directly proportional to the percentage of the population between 15 and 29. However, as we have seen (Fig. 1.9), people in this age group represent approximately the same percentage of society from one developing region to the next, with the exception of East Asia, for which the disparity with other regions is somewhat greater. Comparison of these figures shows that, with respect to unemployment, what distinguishes the condition of young people in MENA from that of their peers in other developing regions is not demographics, but, plainly, the social and political conditions responsible for an economic situation thanks to which nearly one- of youth between the ages of 15 and 24 are, according to official statistics, looking for work.45

  FIGURE 1.10 Unemployment rate by sex, 2010 (%). (Source: ILO)

  FEMALE UNDEREMPLOYMENT

  The other major distinguishing feature of MENA unemployment is the disparity, greater than anywhere else in the world, between the proportions of men and women in the “labor force” seeking employment. The percentage of unemployed women is more than twice that of men in MENA. It is also twice that of women in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the next highest rate of female unemployment. It is three times that of women in South Asia and Southeast Asia, to say nothing of East Asia, where proportionately fewer women than men are looking for work (Fig. 1.10).

  As with young people, the number of unemployed women represents only a small proportion of all women without employment. In this respect, too, MENA holds an unenviable, even more memorable record. Whereas in 2010, 18.5% of Middle Eastern and 16.4% of North African women in the “active population” were seeking work, only 14.8% and 20%, respectively, of women in those regions who were old enough to work (15 or older) had a job (Fig. 1.11). When we combine the numbers of employed women and those seeking employment, it appears that only 18.1% (in the Middle East) and 24% (in North Africa) of the women old enough to work were counted as part of the “labor force,” a particularly low rate, as becomes clear when we compare it with the rate for men in the two regions (73.6% and 74.1% respectively) or with the rate for women in the other developing regions of Africa and Asia (in 2010, 31.7% in South Asia, 58.6% in Southeast Asia, 64.4% in sub-Saharan Africa, and 66.9% in East Asia).46

  FIGURE 1.11 Employment-to-population rate by sex, 2010 (%). (Source: ILO)

  These rates of women without jobs comprise, along with youth unemployment rates, the other feature distinguishing MENA from the rest of the world. The demographic explanation commonly given for youth unemployment cannot, of course, hold for the high proportion of women without jobs, since there are not more women than men in the region (in fact, there are slightly fewer women). Here, a cultural explanation is most often held out. Unlike the demographic argument about youth unemployment—we have seen what that is worth—there is little doubt that a cultural factor does indeed play a role, albeit to different degrees in different countries, in generating the extraordinary female nonemployment rates just noted. In order to legitimately take it into account in our analysis, we have to begin by acknowledging that culture is not nature and that mores and customs are themselves social realities that vary considerably over time. Suffice it to compare contemporary with medieval European cultures.

  The variety of patriarchal male chauvinist culture predominant in MENA is not the efficient cause but overridingly the product of a particularly oppressive system of male domination that succeeds in reproducing itself the same way that despotic regimes do, that is, thanks to a combination of force and consent internalized by way of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence.” To grasp this is to understand that culture is not eternal, but that “the eternal” itself “cannot be anything other than the product of a historical labor of eternalization.” That is the term Bourdieu employs in Masculine Domination,47 a work that offers a useful account of the ideological sources of domination, although it has been criticized by Western feminists, notably for underestimating women’s self-emancipation. Bourdieu adds, in his idiosyncratic style, that a history of women “which brings to light, albeit despite itself, a large degree of constancy, permanence, must, if it wants to be consistent with itself, give a place, and no doubt the central place, to the history of the agents and institutions which permanently contribute to the maintenance of these permanences—the church, the state, the educational system etc., and which may vary, at different times, in their relative weight and their functions.”48

  A good overview of MENA women’s economic situation was provided by a 2004 report for the World Bank put together by a predominantly female team, advised by Iranian dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi. Released under the title Gender and Development in the Middle East and North Africa,49 the report laudably considers cultural factors to be social factors.
Thus it considers what it calls “the traditional gender paradigm” in MENA: the fact that the family rather than the individual is the basic social unit; that the man of the house has the breadwinner’s role; that a “code of modesty” is imposed on women; and that a form of inequality perpetuated by the law gives men advantages in the private sphere.50 This traditional paradigm, however, should have been demolished by the same factors that have proven decisive in other climes. This is what the report calls “the gender paradox” specific to the region:

  MENA’s achievements in many areas of women’s well-being compare favorably with those of other regions. Indicators such as female education, fertility, and life expectancy show that MENA’s progress in those areas in recent decades has been substantial. Where MENA falls considerably short is on indicators of women’s economic participation and political empowerment.

  MENA’s rate of female labor force participation is significantly lower than rates in the rest of the world, and it is lower than would be expected when considering the region’s fertility rates, its educational levels, and the age structure of the female population.51

  TABLE 1.3 GROSS ENROLLMENT RATIO IN TERTIARY EDUCATION (2009)

  This paradox comes at a price, and it is a high one. A study carried out by two University of Munich economists for the report just cited calculates the growth differential associated with gender inequalities, comparing a group of MENA countries (excluding most of the rich oil monarchies) with East Asia. It comes to the conclusion that if MENA had since 1960 enjoyed a rate of female employment equal to East Asia’s, its per capita GDP in 2000 would have been $2,173 dollars higher (in constant 1996 dollars) than it was that year.52 This finding, which, of course, provides only a rough order of magnitude estimate, should be compared with per capita GDP in the region as a whole, which was, in 2009, only $2,361 (in 1996 dollars, the equivalent of $3,281 in 2011 dollars).53 According to the same study, if MENA had had a female employment rate equal to East Asia’s only from 1990 on, its per capita GDP in 2000 would still have been $518 higher, a very substantial difference.