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Ed Webb

Saudi 'instant visa' and the challenges of open labor markets - Al Arabiya English - 0 views

english.alarabiya.net/...ges-of-open-labor-markets.html

KSA Saudi GCC migrants migrant workers labor labour development policy economy opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Mar 20 - Cached
  • The Saudi government’s new “instant visa” fast tracks the process of hiring foreign workers for nascent firms, and is accompanied by a one-year grace period on Saudization requirements. Coming in the wake of aggressive moves to limit job opportunities for migrants, including sector-wide bans on the employment of migrant workers, the new policy highlights the challenges of striking the right balance between creating jobs for Saudis and supporting Saudi businesses. The debate is hindered by fundamental analytical errors that proponents of each side make when arguing their case.
  • Decades of providing Saudi businesses with an inexhaustible supply of low-cost workers has made them into primitive enterprises: their business model scarcely develops beyond importing foreign goods, putting low-cost foreign hands to work, having a couple of Saudi overseers—usually the establishment’s proprietors—and reselling the imported goods domestically with minimal value added.
  • Counterintuitively, a key flaw in this commercial model is its ability to effortlessly adapt to changes in the economic climate. When business is booming, new workers can be hired instantly at exactly the same wage as before. And when the economy contracts, such as when oil prices fall, the migrant workers on the company’s books are made redundant at the stroke of a pen, stabilizing the firm’s finances. In both cases, managers fixate on migrant workers as the primary control variable, at the expense of considerations relating to productivity and innovation.
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  • in western economies, low-cost migrant workers are largely unavailable. When the economy booms, wages rise, forcing managers to think judiciously about hiring. During a recession, employment protections for citizens mean that redundancies are complicated and sometimes impossible. Consequently, managers focus a lot more on maximizing worker productivity through investments and employee training; and on developing new technologies that are commercially valuable.
  • the Gulf countries rank below every region in the world in terms of R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, and the limited spending is almost exclusively funded by the government, and occurs in governmental organizations, such as oil giants Aramco and ADNOC.
  • the fundamental error made by proponents of restrictions on migrant workers. Rather than making the case I made above, they make the erroneous claim that if Saudi Arabia bans migrant workers, Saudi businesses will hire nationals in their stead. We know that this is false empirically because all of the Gulf countries have tried this and it has failed. The failure was also expected because national and migrant workers are imperfect substitutes. It is tempting to attribute the attractiveness of migrant workers merely to their willingness to work for a lower wage, or to domestic businesses “lacking patriotism”; but this belies the genuine superiority of migrant workers in many relevant domains, including work ethic, willingness to perform jobs that locals are averse to (waiting tables, collecting refuse, etc.), and their possession of skills that nationals often lack.
  • Saudis are too often educated in the areas that help one get a cushy public sector job, and not in those that serve the private sector needs. This is most starkly seen in the limited success of vocational training, especially when compared to advanced economies such as Germany or Switzerland.
  • for crude restrictions on the employment of migrant workers to create jobs for Saudi citizens, they must be accompanied by upgrades to the human capital of Saudis that attend to the needs of the private sector
  • while the new system makes hiring foreign workers “instant”, the results of these comprehensive reforms will be anything but “instant”, requiring many years to bear fruit
Ed Webb

Torture in Bahrain Becomes Routine With Help From Nokia Siemens - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-nokia-siemens-networking.html

Bahrain surveillance

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them
  • “The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.
  • Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.
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  • “We are very aware that communications technology can be used for good and ill,” NSN spokesman Roome says. The elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-center business, and the company has since established a human rights policy and due diligence program, he says. “Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions,” he says.
  • Besides Bahrain, several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year -- including Egypt, Syria and Yemen -- also purchased monitoring centers from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor. Trovicor equipment plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.
  • Uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain have drawn strength from technologies such as social-networking sites and mobile-phone videos. Yet, the flip side of the technology that played a part in this year’s “Facebook revolutions” may be far more forceful. Rulers fought back, exploiting their citizens’ digital connections with increasingly intrusive tools. They’ve tapped a market that’s worth more than $3 billion a year, according to Jerry Lucas, president of McLean, Virginia- based TeleStrategies Inc., organizer of the ISS World trade shows for intelligence and lawful interception businesses. He derives that estimate by applying per-employee revenue figures from publicly traded Verint’s lawful intercept business across the mostly privately held industry.
  • The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and other human rights activists have blamed Nokia Siemens for aiding government repression. In 2009, the company disclosed that it sold a monitoring center to Iran, prompting hearings in the European Parliament, proposals for tighter restrictions on U.S. trade with Iran, and an international “No to Nokia” boycott campaign. While there have been credible reports the gear may have been used to crack down on Iranian dissidents, those claims have never been substantiated, NSN spokesman Roome says. In Bahrain, officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He says he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.
  • During the Arab spring, it was easy to spot the company’s fingerprints, says Gyamlani. Tuning in to Germany’s N24 news channel at his home in Munich, he immediately suspected that governments were abusing systems he’d installed. Failed uprisings stood out to him because of the way the authorities quashed unrest before it spread
  • Schaake says surveillance systems involving information and communications technology should join military items such as missile parts on lists of restricted exports. Schaake helped to sponsor a parliamentary resolution in February 2010 that called for the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, to ban exports of such technology to regimes that could abuse it. The commission hasn’t implemented the nonbinding resolution. The U.S. Congress passed a law in 2010 barring federal contracts with any businesses that sold monitoring gear to Iran. An investigation ordered by Congress and completed in June by the Government Accountability Office was unable to identify any companies supplying the technology to Iran, partly because the business is so secretive, the agency reported.
Ed Webb

Late Populism: State Distributional Regimes and Economic Conflict after the Arab Uprisi... - 0 views

pomeps.org/...flict-after-the-arab-uprisings

MENA ArabWorld states economy analysis politics corruption

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • This note will briefly outline the notion of an Arab “variety of capitalism” characterized by the central role of a distributive state whose interventions lead to a deep, and at least in parts unintended, segmentation of business and labour markets into insiders and outsiders. It will explain how this model has led to economic stagnation and contributed to the uprisings of 2011 as well as how it has hobbled economic adjustment after the uprisings, both under anciens and new regimes. Its pessimistic conclusion is that distributional institutions in most Arab countries remain very sticky, having created powerful vested interests not only in business but also in society at large that undermine the negotiation of a new “social contract” – a concept that many are talking about but no one seems to be able to map out in any detail.
  • Authoritarian-populist republics like Algeria, Egypt, (pre-war) Syria and Tunisia have achieved particularly good human development scores considering their modest levels of wealth (figure 3).
  • While Arab governments’ ambition to provide might have led to solid coverage of basic services, most Arab states have pledged much wider material guarantees to their citizens – typically beyond their fiscal and administrative capacity, especially once economic growth started stalling in the 1970s. The result has been a rigid insider-outsider division in which some benefit from Arab governments’ relative generosity while others remain excluded.
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  • The shares of public in total employment across core Arab countries in Maghreb and Mashreq mostly lie between 20 and 40 percent, far above those in richer Latin America, where they range from 4 to 15 percent (OECD 2014, 61), sub-Saharan Africa, where they range from 2 to 9 percent (Monga and Lin 2015, 138), or East Asia and Pacific, where they mostly lie below 5 percent (Packard and Van Nguyen 2014, 16).
  • A majority of citizens, however, remains excluded from state employment, which is often seen to be allocated in intransparent ways. As formal employment in the private sector remains miniscule, the default option for most remains the badly paid, precarious informal sector.
  • A large informal sector also exists in other developing countries. But different from most other developing economies, the “insider” group on the labor market mostly consists of public employees (figure 5). This setup makes for a relatively large and protected insider group, but also crowds out state resources for more inclusive and growth-oriented policies.
  • Insider-outsider dynamics are also at play in Arab business, the top tiers of which are typically state-dependent cronies, protected through layers of heavy regulation as well as discretionary subsidies and credit allocation – themselves often distorted legacies of earlier periods of statist development
  • On labor markets, informality typically lasts longer, labor turnover is lower, and exits from public employment are almost unheard of
  • deep formal and informal state intervention and protection result in low mobility between segments
  • The only universal benefit on which most Arab states spend large amounts are energy subsidies, which are regressive as they disproportionately benefit richer households.
  • While Arab states have gone to great lengths to provide, popular expectations of provision in the region have also been particularly high (figure 6) – arguably a legacy of populist policies that have promised universal public services and employment to the masses since the age of Nasser.
  • Given these high expectations, material exclusion and inequality and the highly visible “winner takes all” business cronyism in the 2000s has been grating for many ordinary citizens – even if average levels of inequality in the region remain on a middling level in global comparison
  • While the elites leading the revolutions cared deeply about questions of political freedom, it is clear that material issues played an important role in the mass mobilization that tipped the balance in cases like Egypt or Tunisia.
  • Since 2011, some energy subsidies have been cut in a piecemeal fashion, but only under enormous fiscal pressure and without building a comprehensive social safety system to compensate. In the absence of such systems, public resistance to subsidy reforms has been strong. No ruler has yet dared to substantially change public employment policies.
  • This anti-development equilibrium of low capacity and vested interests has led Arab states even further down the route of unequal and exclusive distribution after 2011. In Tunisia, the most powerful interest group is the national union UGTT, which represents mostly middle aged, middle class government employees – not the informal sector whose rage fuelled the revolution. The UGGT has contributed to elite-level political pacts that have prevented Tunisia from backsliding into autocracy. In the economic field, however, it has mostly focused on defending insider privileges, investing much of its energy in fighting successfully for fiscally unsustainable civil service salary raises. In the meantime, little has been done for improving the lot of informal workers. They themselves remain fixated on the public sector: protesters from marginalized communities have been asking for the provision of one government job per family, and unrest has been triggered by the removal of individuals from an official list promising government employment.
  • Even “fierce” states embroiled in civil wars have deepened their old-style distributional commitments: Post-Saddam patronage policies under rival prime ministers have resulted in a state that now reportedly employs 7 million individuals, about half the total adult population (More than 55 percent of the population of about 36 million is under 20). Including in ISIS-occupied areas, 8 million individuals rely on a government salary or pension. Iraq competes with much richer GCC countries for the highest share of government employees anywhere in the world
  • Tunisian and Egyptian attempts to prosecute old regime cronies have been half-hearted at best and many cronies remain well connected to the new ruling elites. In the absence of an independent business class, both governments have made attempts to lure temporarily marginalized old-school business tycoons back into their countries to invest.
Ed Webb

Sisi's Dilemma - Sada - 0 views

carnegieendowment.org/...hhzd

Egypt politics military Sisi authoritarianism institutions

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Sisi’s primary support base consists of the state institutions that brought him to power—particularly the military, which he led from August 2012 until March 2014 and whose senior officers endorsed his presidential bid. Yet an overreliance on these institutions could undermine Sisi’s capacity to address Egypt’s pressing economic problems and leave him vulnerable to a reemergence of popular discontent.
  • Reflecting intense frustration with the revolutionary upheaval of the past three years and the resulting challenges to state institutions, Sisi’s regime has attempted to reestablish the top-down, controlled politics of pre-revolution Egypt.
  • This attempt to repress political activity has also influenced the design of Egypt’s elected institutions, which have been structured to limit the reach of popular politics. For example, the new law for parliamentary elections seeks to benefit prominent individuals with ties to big business and the former Mubarak regime, rather than political parties. The balance of power in the 2014 constitution also works against representative institutions in favor of stronger state institutions like the military, judiciary, and security forces.
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  • Sisi needs the senior officers more than they need him
  • The military’s extensive business interests—ranging from major infrastructure and development projects to the operation of hotels and gas stations—fuel corruption and crowd out private companies. Sisi’s government already has and will likely continue to expand these interests rather than reforming them. This limiting relationship also applies to the broader state bureaucracy, which will be protective of the status quo and reluctant to implement potentially disruptive changes. Though a more organized political base would not eliminate this problem for Sisi, it would offer him some leverage over state institutions to enact broader reforms.
  • Because the military has its own reputation to protect, it is more likely to adopt populist stances when the president takes unpopular decisions.
Ed Webb

Mohammed bin Salman Isn't Wonky Enough - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...d-bin-salman-isnt-wonky-enough

KSA Saudi economy reform demographics analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Like Western investors, the kingdom’s elites are uncertain about what the new order means for the country’s economy. The new Saudi leadership has indeed created new opportunities, but many of the deep structural barriers to diversification remain unchanged. The bulk of the public sector remains bloated by patronage employment, the private sector is still dominated by cheap foreign labor, and private economic activity remains deeply dependent on state spending. Addressing these challenges could take a generation — and it will require patience, creativity, and a clearer sense of priorities.
  • While a band of Al Saud brothers used to rule collectively with the king as a figurehead, decision-making has now become centralized under one man
  • ruthlessness and willingness to take risks radically at odds with the cautious and consensual political culture of the Al Saud clan
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  • New policies and programs are announced constantly, while the delivery capacity of the sluggish Saudi bureaucracy continues to lag. Below the upper echelons, the Saudi state remains the deeply fragmented, bloated, and slow-moving machine that I described in my 2010 book. The government seems to have no clear strategy for reforming this bureaucracy
  • While space for political opposition arguably has narrowed, women will soon be allowed to drive and the religious police force that once harassed them has been almost entirely neutered. By relaxing religious controls over the public sphere, the crown prince is seeking to attract more foreign investment and facilitate diversification into tourism and entertainment
  • Saudi Arabia has tackled fiscal reforms more vigorously than most local and international observers expected, introducing unprecedented tax and energy price measures, including the introduction of a 5 percent value added tax, new levies on foreign workers, and increases in electricity and transport fuel prices. The government is now experimenting with new non-oil sectors with an increased sense of urgency, including information technology and defense manufacturing.
  • As limits on government employment kick in, young Saudis will increasingly have no choice but to seek private jobs. But they will face tough competition on the private labor market where employers have become accustomed to recruiting low-wage workers from poorer Arab and Asian countries
  • public sector employment remains the key means of providing income to Saudi nationals. Cheap foreign labor dominates private sector employment, thereby keeping consumer inflation at bay and business owners happy. Citizens, however, are parked in the overstaffed public sector. Out of every three jobs held by Saudis, roughly two are in government. The average ratio around the world is one in five. Public sector wages account for almost half of total government spending, among the highest shares in the world
  • Local economic advisors fear that the majority of private petrochemicals firms — the most developed part of Saudi industry — would lose money if prices of natural gas, their main input, increase to American levels.
  • Saudi wage demands will have to drop further if private job creation is to substitute for the erstwhile government employment guarantee. For the time being, private job creation has stalled as the government has pursued moderate austerity since 2015 in response to deficits and falling oil prices
  • The government has also underestimated how dependent private businesses are on state spending. The share of state spending in the non-oil economy is extremely high compared to other economies. Historically, almost all private sector growth has resulted from increases in public spending
  • As long as oil prices remain below $70 per barrel, the goal of a balanced budget will cause pain for businesses and limit private job creation. This will pose a major political challenge at a time when an estimated 200,000 Saudis are entering the labor market every year. More than 60 percent of the population is under 30, which means that the citizen labor force will grow rapidly for at least the next two decades.
  • It would be far more prudent to gently prepare citizens and businesses for a difficult and protracted adjustment period and to focus on a smaller number of priorities
  • The key structural challenge to non-oil growth is the way the Saudi government currently shares its wealth, most notably through mass public employment — an extremely expensive policy that bloats the bureaucracy, distorts labor markets, and is increasingly inequitable in an era when government jobs can no longer be guaranteed to all citizens. A stagnating economic pie that might even shrink in the coming years must be shared more equitably.
  • A basic income would not only guarantee a basic livelihood for all citizens, but also serve as a grand political gesture that could justify difficult public sector reforms. A universal wealth-sharing scheme would make it easier to freeze government hiring and send a clear signal that, from now on, Saudis need to seek and acquire the skills for private employment and entrepreneurship. The government could supplement this scheme by charging fees to firms that employ foreigners while subsidizing wages for citizens to fully close the wage gap between the two.
  • Focusing on such fundamentals might be less exciting than building new cities in the desert or launching the world’s largest-ever IPO — but they are more important for the kingdom’s economic future. No country as dependent on petroleum as Saudi Arabia has ever effectively diversified away from oil
Ed Webb

The Abu Dhabi royal at the nexus of UAE business and national security | Free to read |... - 0 views

www.ft.com/...1b-041d-4651-9bbb-d2a16d39ede7

politics authoritarianism analysis economy UAE GCC Qatar KSA Saudi Israel intelligence security

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jun 21 - Cached
  • Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser. The meeting in August last year in the UAE suggested that intelligence co-operation would be at the core of the new alliance. And it thrust Sheikh Tahnoon — who has emerged as one of the UAE’s most influential figures — into the limelight.His rise over the past decade epitomises the nexus between power, business and national strategic interest in Gulf states such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where a younger, tech-savvy and security-minded generation of royals have come to the fore. It also offers a glimpse into the inner workings of Abu Dhabi’s absolute monarchy, where the ruling family and a clique of trusted lieutenants dominate security and key sectors of the economy, blurring the lines between state and private enterprise.
  • A full brother of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and the UAE’s de facto leader, Sheikh Tahnoon manages a sprawling portfolio that straddles national security and the often opaque corporate sector in the oil-rich emirate.
  • With the pandemic sharpening Abu Dhabi’s focus on health, technology and food security, companies affiliated with Sheikh Tahnoon have conducted a series of deals in areas of national strategic interest. ADQ acquired an indirect 45 per cent stake in Louis Dreyfus Company in November. The deal included a long-term agreement for the global merchant and processor of agricultural goods to supply the Abu Dhabi holding company with agri-commodities. It is part of a trend that has seen him become the most active member of the ruling family whose business interests overlap with the state’s.
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  • “If you have a guy who is playing poker and he starts with two aces, better not to play against him,” says a foreign executive with years of experience in Abu Dhabi. “You can’t compete against the royal family when all the big business is generated by the state.”
  • The blurring of lines between the state and royal interests has long been a characteristic of Gulf states. But it has become more pronounced, particularly in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, at a time when leaders of the two countries have become more autocratic, security conscious and determined to develop new sectors, often related to technological advances.
  • A younger generation of royals is also at the helm in Qatar, where Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani became emir aged just 33. Under his watch, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, a 40-year-old distant relative of the emir, has become a rising star. He has been promoted through the ranks to become the wealthy state’s foreign minister and most powerful investor as the hands-on chair of the Qatar Investment Authority.
  • A son of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the UAE’s founding father, Sheikh Tahnoon is one of a group of six powerful full-brothers, headed by Sheikh Mohammed, who are known as the “Bani Fatima six” in reference to their mother. Others include Sheikh Mansour, the billionaire owner of Manchester City football club. Another is Sheikh Abdullah, the foreign minister.
  • Foreign officials describe Sheikh Tahnoon as pragmatic, probing and analytical. The former US diplomat says he was the first senior Emirati to raise the prospect of the UAE pulling out of the war in Yemen, realising it could not be won, in 2016. That was three years before the Gulf state began withdrawing troops after Abu Dhabi and Riyadh had attracted widespread criticism for their role in the conflict.
  • UN experts have repeatedly accused the UAE of violating an arms embargo on Libya.
  • The US Defense Intelligence Agency “assessed” that the UAE “may provide some financing” for the Libya operations of Russia’s Wagner Group, which has deployed about 2,000 mercenaries to back Gen Haftar
  • The creation of companies such as G42 is viewed by knowledgeable observers as an extension of the emirate’s national strategic goals as it relies heavily on technology in sectors ranging from security to health. Its relationship with Israel is expected to focus on these and other areas such as agritech, with entities linked to the state and the ruling family likely to take the lead.
Ed Webb

How coronavirus shutdown affected Qatar's migrant workers | Coronavirus pandemic | Al J... - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...t-workers-200608171702268.html

Qatar gulf GCC labor migrant workers pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jun 20 - Cached
  • Al Jazeera spoke to numerous affected migrant workers, including driving instructors, salon staff, baristas, chefs, private taxi drivers, small business owners, and hotel and hospitality staff. Most of them have not received any assistance from their employers and are afraid of complaining.
  • Qatar's labour ministry also did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment but the country's Government Communications Office (GCO) said, "The government has put measures in place to guarantee salaries are paid on schedule and in full."
  • Qatar's government said it encourages workers to lodge their complaints with the ministry via a phone call, text or email. However, to encourage workers to cast their fears aside and come forward to complain - and to ensure compliance on the employers' part - the government needs to "name and shame businesses" and "remove or reform absconding laws", according to Vani Saraswathi, director of projects at Migrant-Rights.Org.
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  • "If the government chooses to allow private parties to manage migration, it should at the very least hold private parties to high standards, monitor them closely, and penalise those who violate rights."
  • On Monday, Qatar announced the gradual lifting of coronavirus restrictions from June 15. But even when those are eased, "saving jobs and restarting businesses will require significant adjustments with cost implications", ILO's Homayounpour said, adding "smaller businesses especially will need ongoing support to ensure that the reopening of workplaces occurs with safeguards for the safety of workers and consumers alike". 
Ed Webb

Egypt currency has further to fall: business leader | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...currency-idUSBRE91G0DB20130217

Egypt economy MB ikhwan transition

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Egypt has begun devaluing its currency to help revive the economy and meet the conditions of an expected IMF loan and the depreciation has further to go, a business leader in the ruling Muslim Brotherhood said
  • "We have started already some increase in taxation, and there is the devaluation of the pound and we raised some prices of petrol and gas," Malek said in an interview."Normal people in the street now understand that there is a price that we will have to pay for the IMF agreement."Asked whether he expected a further depreciation of the Egyptian currency to help exports and tourism, he said: "I'm not of course a technical (expert) but people expect a little bit of devaluation in the future."
  • Malek, who was imprisoned under Mubarak with top Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat el-Shater, his friend and business partner, said he was actively trying to persuade wealthy Egyptians to return and invest in the country.Asked if he was personally involved in trying to persuade billionaires who have left Egypt and had their assets frozen or been convicted of economic crimes to come home, he said "Yes. I am inviting everyone to come to Egypt. It is very important to prioritize legislation and court cases should be solved first... before these people come back."
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  • Malek said his organization was also trying to broker a solution to Cairo's debt to foreign energy companies producing oil and gas in Egypt such as BP, Gas Natural, Petronas, Shell and Dana, that has accumulated since the 2011 uprising.He disputed the figure of $9 billion cited by consultancy Executive Analysis and European diplomats for the total energy debt, saying it was far less, but declined to give a number."Some of their contracts needed to be reviewed because they were not balanced to cover both the national interest and the company interest. So some licenses were suspended when they expired, which made a bit of a problem," Malek said."We tried to encourage them by giving them more concessions and rescheduling these payments (owed by Egypt). We opened other opportunities in the same field such as refineries and other projects they can take. Up to this moment, none of these companies has decided to leave," Malek said.He acknowledged that most foreign energy companies were still holding back on new investments in Egypt. "They want to see these problems tackled first. They want to see a clear road map, which is normal in such an environment."
Ed Webb

ANALYSIS: Egypt's military-economic empire - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...itary-economic-empire-35257665

Egypt military military-industrial_complex economy business analysis corruption

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The roots of the military’s commercial empire go back to the 1980s, when a combination of a peace dividend after Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel and a fiscal crisis led the country to pare back its defence budget. Defence spending as a proportion of GDP fell from 6.5 percent in 1988 to 1.8 percent in 2012, according to World Bank indicators. The armed forces had to find new sources of revenue.
  • the consensus among those asked by Middle East Eye as to the size of the military-economic complex is that the EAF’s reach extends into virtually every economic sector, from foodstuffs like tomato paste and olive oil, to consumer electronics to real estate, construction, transport and services
  • Businesses controlled by the military are widely dispersed. Some may come under a number of umbrella organisations, including the Arab Organisation for Industrialisation, the National Services Projects Organisation (NSPO) and the Ministry of Military Production. In addition, the EAF holds majority or minority stakes in many other semi-public or private companies, especially in the fields of infrastructure and subcontracting. EAF influence also extends to “sensitive” but nominally civilian infrastructure. Senior positions at a number of airports have for some years been reserved for retired army officers, as a sort of unofficial “pension programme.”
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  • the EAF is able, through the use of land designations and other means, to control much of the public lands (desert, agricultural and urban) that comprise 94 percent of Egypt’s area, through the use of land designations, the ability to auction such lands and to receive compensation from the state treasury when military zones are rezoned to civilian purposes. The army also controls the coastline (officially classed as border territory) and is thus able to profit from tourist developments. As such, the EAF wields enormous influence over the real estate market and the country’s development structure
  • Estimates as to how much of the total economy is controlled by the EAF range from 40 percent, according to telecoms billionaire Naguib Sawiris (in comments to local media last March) to somewhere between 45 percent and 60 percent, according to Transparency International
  • forced labour, in the form of conscripts, is almost certainly used in army-run factories. Quite apart from the ethical ramifications of this, it allows the military to undercut its competitors, since conscripts don’t have to be paid full wages
  • since the military’s budget - and by extension, its economic fiefdom – is kept secret, EAF-controlled businesses can benefit from subsidies that are kept off the books, as well as having more freedom of manoeuvre amid the lack of oversight.  One example was the decision under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to slash fuel subsidies for industrialists. Since the military’s budget (and therefore, its energy costs) are off the books, the rising energy prices disproportionately affected EAF competitors, but not the forces themselves
  • military involvement in the political economy generally leads to worse performance. Within the region, the examples of Iran and Algeria point to this, while China has taken steps to reduce its armed forces’ commercial exposure over the past few years precisely for this reason
  • A further effect of the EAF’s economic dominance is a lack of growth opportunities for SMEs, since only favoured insiders can win lucrative contracts and deal with the permit system. In turn, this leads to a large informal economy of insiders, leaving many Egyptians outside, in poverty
  • While patronage is nothing new in Egyptian politics, since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power the top brass has expanded intra-military patronage to the extent that they are crowding out other economic actors and failing to bring in key constituencies such as opposition groups, the private sector bourgeoisie and the urban poor. The EAF has expanded its reach so fast that now it has to defend its empire against these groups, sowing seeds of further strife in future.
Ed Webb

Erdogan accuses TUSIAD chairman of treason - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...key-business-tax-politics.html

Turkey AKP erdogan Gulen authoritarianism business economy bank media

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Erdogan responded the next day by accusing Yilmaz of “treason against the country.” He said: “The TUSIAD chair cannot say, ‘Global capital won’t come to such a country.’ If he said that, then that is treason against this country. After you said that, with what nerve are you going to invite the ministers of this government to TUSIAD? With what nerve you will come to this prime minister and his government to solve your problems regarding your investments?"
  • Yilmaz’s warnings should be taken seriously. He and TUSIAD are not known for being highly politicized
  • It is also not a coincidence that TUSIAD’s warnings were voiced following the Dec. 17 bribery and graft investigation that led to a dramatic escalation in the AKP-Fethullah Gulen Movement war. The government’s tendency to use its financial auditing powers to influence capital groups and opposition politicians it doesn’t like gained momentum after that date. The latest example came on Jan. 17, when the bank accounts and assets of Mustafa Sarigul, a candidate for mayor of metropolitan Istanbul and a member of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party, were impounded by the Saving Deposits Insurance Fund (TMSF) 73 days before the local elections on grounds of a $3.5 million credit debt from 16 years ago. 
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  • The way for Turkey to achieve a sustainable growth rate by financing its current deficit is to make the country attractive for direct foreign investment. That in turn requires Turkey to have a properly functioning legal system, properly and justly operating independent institutions, good governance, a stable democracy and a free market — in short, to be predictable. Authoritarian and arbitrarily governed countries first lose their predictability.
  • The same situation has emerged concerning the Koc Group, which has been subjected to one tax penalty after another. The Koc Group, the largest capital group of Turkey, attracted the ire of Erdogan during the June 2013 Gezi Park protests when the nearby Divan Hotel it owns opened its doors to those escaping the pepper gas and brutality of the police. Erdogan perceived that as a challenge and accused the Koc Group of being accomplices to the protesters. Alluding to the group June 17, he actually said, "We know those who cooperate with terrorists and accommodate them in their hotels. We will settle accounts on this. Now we have an interest lobby emerging.” We all discovered how that account was be settled when tax audit teams from the Ministry of Finance accompanied by police raided the Koc companies.
  • Mustafa Boydak, the president of the Chamber of Industry of the Anatolian industrial city of Kayseri and a well-known conservative industrialist, denounced the tax audit of the Koc Group and called on the government "not to become party to the business world and not to treat the companies that carry Turkey as an enemy.” The government clearly didn’t appreciate Boydak’s call and responded with a tax audit of the Boydak Holding group of companies.
  • Some public corporations led by Turkish Airlines and private companies with ties to the government withdrew 900 million lira ($391 million) of deposits from Bank Asya, recognized as the Gulen movement's bank, on the same day without waiting for the deposits to mature, and put the bank in a tough bind. Bank Asya was saved from going under when companies and businessmen affiliated with Gulen deposited the same amount of money.
  • The first allegations of the AKP government using tax penalties as a political weapon came out in 2008, when the Dogan Media Group was openly targeted by Erdogan and fined $1.6 billion
Ed Webb

Triumphant Turkey? by Stephen Kinzer | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...triumphant-turkey

Turkey democracy censorship authoritarianism politics economics

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Erdogan the most powerful Turkish leader in more than half a century to win three consecutive terms. He now enjoys more power than any Turkish leader since Kemal Atatürk, who founded the Republic in 1923
  • Turks are uneasy. Some worry that the economy, which grew at a spectacular 8.9 percent last year, may be overheating. Others fear that Erdogan’s renewed power will lead him to antidemocratic excesses. A boycott of parliament by dozens of Kurdish deputies cast doubt on his willingness to resolve the long-festering Kurdish conflict. There is also a new source of uncertainty, emerging from uprisings in Arab countries. For the last several years, Turks have pursued the foreign policy goal of “zero problems with neighbors.” In recent months they have been forced to realize that they cannot, after all, be friends with everyone in the neighborhood.
  • Turkey has emerged from the shadow of military power, a breakthrough of historic proportions. Whether it is moving toward an era of European-style freedom or simply trading one form of authoritarianism for another is unclear.
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  • In March, for example, two journalists were arrested on charges that they had been in contact with military officers who were plotting to overthrow the government. Soon afterward, several thousand people marched down Istanbul’s main street protesting the arrests. They held placards reading “Free Press, Free Society,” and “Turkey Rates 138 in Press Freedom”—a reference to a recent ranking by Reporters Without Borders.The next day, Erdogan delivered a speech in Istanbul. It was an ideal moment for him to reassure panicky citizens and foreigners worried about press freedom in Turkey. Instead he denounced defenders of the arrested journalists, accusing them of launching a “systematic defamation campaign against Turkey” shaped by “evil-minded intentions and prejudices.”This demagogic language disturbs many Turks, including some who admire what Erdogan has achieved. “I have never been as positive and enthusiastic as I am now,” one of the country’s visionary business leaders, the octogenarian Ishak Alaton, a lifelong human rights campaigner, told me in his office overlooking the Bosphorus. But he also lamented that Erdogan has begun to govern with “the sense that he’s invulnerable and omnipotent and all-powerful.”
  • None of the dozens of people I met during a recent visit suggested that Turkey is in danger of slipping toward Islamist rule. Turkish society has defenses that most Arab societies lack: generations of experience with secularism and democracy, a growing middle class, a booming export economy, a still-lively press, and a strong civil society based in universities, labor unions, business associations, and civic, human rights, and environmental groups. The emerging conflict in Turkey is not over religion, but styles of power.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 19 Aug 11
       
      Nicely put.
  • Partly because the EU has slammed its door in Turkey’s face, Erdogan’s government has been looking elsewhere for friends. This has helped draw Turkey away from half a century of subservience to Western foreign policy. Its first act of defiance came in 2003, when parliament voted against allowing American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. Since then, Turkey has broken ranks with the West on two important issues. It favors negotiation with Iran and stronger pressure on Israel to change its policies in Gaza and the West Bank.
  • Banu Eligur, who has taught courses on political Islam at Brandeis University and is the author of The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey, believes that Erdogan’s government has “mobilized against the secular-democratic state” by naming pious Muslims to be “high-ranking civil servants in public administration” and by bullying the press, the judiciary, and universities. In fact, much of what Erdogan is doing seems popular. A recent opinion survey taken by an outside group found 62 percent of Turks in favor of Erdogan’s foreign policies. In another, when people were asked to rate their level of religious belief on a scale of one to ten, 71 percent rated themselves at seven or higher. In Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, the historian Carter Vaughn Findley observes that Erdogan’s government has surpassed the old secular establishment “both in recognizing the value of a religiously neutral government as a guarantee of pluralism and in espousing the reforms required to advance Turkey’s EU candidacy”
  • . The plot to destabilize the country, and the cases connected to it, are popularly known as “Ergenekon,” a reference to a mythic Turkic homeland and the name that plotters allegedly gave to their subversive plan. Mike King Many Turks greeted the opening of this case with both astonishment and jubilation. Investigating the military and its corrupt allies in the judiciary and bureaucracy was widely seen as a major step toward consolidating democracy. As the case has dragged on, however, it has taken on a different tinge. The authenticity of some incriminating documents has been challenged. Prosecutors have cast their net so widely that people have begun to wonder whether the true purpose of the case is to punish conspirators or to intimidate critics of the government. Since the government has been slowly replacing prosecutors with people it favors, there is suspicion that politics is once again intruding into the judiciary.
  • “I can no more believe these two guys were part of Ergenekon than I can believe Obama is part of the Ku Klux Klan,” said Hakan Altinay, a former director of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey, which is supported by George Soros. “It’s an important episode for left-liberal opinion, which has up to now been part of this government’s core support. It’s a tipping point.”If intimidation is a goal of this case, it may be working. “I wonder, is my phone tapped?” a young journalist told me at the end of an interview in Istanbul. “Should I censor myself?”
  • In Streets of Memory, a recent study of cultural attitudes in an Istanbul neighborhood that was a jumble of nationalities, Amy Mills writes:The price of belonging, in Turkey, comes at a cost—the forgetting of particular histories at the expense of the frequent retelling of others and the silencing of particular memories that cannot entirely be repressed. She finds troubling evidence of “polarization in thinking about national identities and minority histories.” People shy away from recalling, for example, the infamous pogrom in 1955 when rioters backed by police attacked homes and businesses owned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. But she also notes “an increasing curiosity and desire among Turkish citizens to learn more about places and pasts in Turkey.”
  • Attacking the government on sensitive issues like Kurdish rights, criticizing its handling of the Ergenekon case, and ridiculing Erdogan personally are not the only ways Turkish journalists can endanger themselves these days. There is another subject some fear to probe too deeply: the power of Fethullah Gulen, a shadowy but immensely influential Turkish religious leader. From a secluded estate in Pennsylvania, where he moved to escape possible prosecution for alleged antisecular remarks in the 1990s, Gulen directs a worldwide movement that is one of the most remarkable forces in modern Isla
  • This movement may be, as its sympathizers insist, a benign force that stabilizes Turkish life. But some Turks mistrust it, and their suspicion deepened when it turned out that one of the journalists arrested in March, Ahmet Sik, was about to publish a book about its rising influence called The Imam’s Army. Police confiscated advance copies. The text, which among other things alleges that Gulen sympathizers dominate the Turkish police, quickly appeared on the Internet, setting off what one blogger called “a frenzy of downloads.”
  • The mayor, Yilmaz Buyukersen, a former university rector, told me that while some other Turkish cities are not as open to pastimes like late-night drinking, he has no doubt that Eskishehir represents Turkey’s future. Like many Turks who are not part of the ruling party or the Gulen movement, though, he worries about what is happening in Ankara.“Reading the newspapers depresses me,” he said. “Everything is about accusing, arguing, fighting.”There is pressure on the press, on labor unions, on professional organizations, on NGOs, on universities. The justice system responds to the ruling party. All of this creates fear in people’s minds. But I’m still optimistic. The new generation is aware of everything, open to the world, and totally in favor of freedom and democracy. Journalists and others are resisting the pressure they’re under. There is absolutely no going back.
  • Erdogan’s party won 326 seats in the 550-member parliament. This was far short of the 367 that would have allowed him to push through whatever constitution he wished, and also shy of the 330 that would have allowed him to call a referendum on a draft of his own. So his triumph at the polls was mixed and his authority is not absolute.
Ed Webb

Under Sisi, firms owned by Egypt's military have flourished - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...egypt-economy-military

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shared by Ed Webb on 19 May 18 - Cached
  • Maadi is one of dozens of military-owned companies that have flourished since Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former armed forces chief, became president in 2014, a year after leading the military in ousting Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.
  • In interviews conducted over the course of a year, the chairmen of nine military-owned firms described how their businesses are expanding and discussed their plans for future growth. Figures from the Ministry of Military Production - one of three main bodies that oversee military firms - show that revenues at its firms are rising sharply. The ministry’s figures and the chairmen’s accounts give rare insight into the way the military is growing in economic influence.
  • Some Egyptian businessmen and foreign investors say they are unsettled by the military’s push into civilian activities and complain about tax and other advantages granted to military-owned firms
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  • In 2016, the military and other security institutions were given exemptions in a new value-added tax (VAT) law enacted as part of IMF-inspired reforms. The law states that the military does not have to pay VAT on goods, equipment, machinery, services and raw materials needed for the purposes of armament, defense and national security.The Ministry of Defense has the right to decide which goods and services qualify. Civilian businessmen complain that this can leave the system open to abuse. Receipts for a cup of coffee at private sector hotels, for example, add 14 percent VAT. Receipts at military hotels do not. Employees at the military-owned Al-Masah Hotel in Cairo told Reuters that no VAT was charged when renting venues for weddings and conferences.
  • The Ministry of Military Production is projecting that operating revenues from its 20 firms will reach 15 billion Egyptian pounds in 2018/2019, five times higher than in 2013/2014, according to a ministry chart. The ministry does not disclose what happens to the revenues. The chairmen of two of the firms said profits go to the ministry or are reinvested in the business.
  • “I don’t want to be a local shop. I want to be a company that has the capacity to export and compete internationally.”
  • The chairmen of two military engineering companies, Abu Zaabal Engineering Industries Co and Helwan Engineering Industries Co, said in recent years it had become much easier to access financing through the Ministry of Military Production.
  • Military companies receive an exemption from import tariffs under a 1986 law and from income taxes under a 2005 law. Cargoes sent to military companies do not have to be inspected.
  • The Ministry of Military Production signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s GCL Group last week to build a solar panel factory worth up to $2 billion. The military has taken over much of the construction of intercity roads from the Ministry of Transport and now controls the toll stations along most major highways.
  • Economists and investors say reforms tied to a $12 billion three-year IMF program signed in Nov. 2016 should lay the ground for economic expansion. But foreign investors are still shying away from Egypt, apart from those focusing on the more resilient energy sector. Non-oil foreign direct investment fell to about $3 billion in 2017 from $4.7 billion in 2016, according to Reuters calculations based on central bank statistics.  
  • foreign investors were reluctant to invest in sectors where the military is expanding or in one they might enter, worried that competing against the military with its special privileges could expose their investment to risk. If an investor had a business dispute with the military, the commercial officer said, there was no point in taking it to arbitration. “You just leave the country,” he said.
  • Egypt’s military, the biggest in the Arab world, has advantages.It enjoys financial support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, staunch supporters of Sisi since he toppled the group they see as a threat to the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood. Western powers see Cairo as a bulwark against Islamist militancy. Egypt receives $1.3 billion in military aid annually from the United States alone.
  • In 2015, the defense minister issued a decree exempting nearly 600 hotels, resorts and other properties owned by the military from real estate taxes
  • Among projects the Ministry of Military Production announced in 2017 was a plan to plant 20 million palm trees with an Emirati company and build a factory to make sugar from their dates. It agreed with a Saudi company to jointly manufacture elevators. The military inaugurated the Middle East’s biggest fish farm on the Nile Delta east of Alexandria.
  • At bustling Cairo squares, people line up to buy subsidized meat and other food handed out from trucks sponsored by the military. Sisi said he had instructed the military to enter the market “to supply more chicken to push down prices.”Some disagree with such measures on the grounds the military’s mission is to protect the country from external threats.“We have reached a point where they are competing even with street vendors,”
Ed Webb

'The threats continue​': murder of retired couple chills fellow activists in ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lls-fellow-activists-in-turkey

Turkey environment economy Erdogan murder violence activism business

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Turkey boasts 40% of the world’s marble reserves and nine out of 10 quarries are found in Anatolia. They are a mainstay of the regional economy and the country’s $2bn-a-year natural stone export business. China is currently the biggest customer, but Turkish marble is also found in Disneyland, the White House, the Vatican, Burj Khalifa, the Bundestag and luxury hotels across the world
  • Ali, Aysin and their fellow campaigners launched a successful challenge that shut down two marble companies Bartu Mermer and Bahçeci. Bartu Mermer fought back with a defamation lawsuit against Ali. But he won again in March 2017. The judge not only acquitted him, but also cancelled the company’s operating license. Hailing the victory, Ali predicted it would be the first of many. “Before, citizens were scared to sue companies – now the decision will encourage all environmentalists,” he declared.
  • A suspect – Ali Ymaç – was quickly found and arrested. He confessed to carrying out the execution in return, he said, for a promise of 50,000 lire (£10,000) from a quarry owner who he knew only by the alias “Çirkin” (Ugly). Yumaç said he was paid 3,000 lire up front and promised the rest on completion. He was instructed to make the killing look like a robbery. That ought to have been where the Turkish justice system cranked into high gear to track down those behind the assassination. Instead, it was the starting point for months of delays, obfuscations and another death that has frightened and frustrated activists and raised wider questions about the country’s slide away from democratic rule of law.
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  • Last month, the public prosecutor was finally ready to submit his indictment, which meant the family’s legal team would get their first opportunity to question Yumaç on the record. He had told them he was ready to reveal everything. He never got the chance. Days later Yumaç reportedly committed suicide in a high-security prison where he had been moved for his safety. Guards claimed he hung himself in a toilet with elastic from his clothing. Many find this incredible.
  • For Turkey’s environmental campaigners, this is part of a broader alarming trend.
  • The attack on the environment now is the biggest in our country’s history.
  • Erdoğan refutes such claims. He says his pro-business policies are in the national interest and accuses those who try to impede development as traitors and terrorists.
  • Eight people died and thousands were injured in clashes between the riot police. “For what?” a scornful Erdoğan asked afterwards. “For 12 trees!” Since then, he has pushed ahead with several massive infrastructure projects – a third airport, a third bridge over the Bosphorus and a new canal – that environmentalists say has led to the felling of 100 million trees.
  • “To be an activist in Turkey is to be constantly worried. We have to protect ourselves as well as the environment.”
  • With forest conservation now such a sensitive political subject, supporters of Ali and Aysin are in a difficult position. They plan to turn the dead couple’s home into a eco-residency, to establish a memorial park in Antalya, and to continue the campaign against the quarries and to get justice for the killings. “This is the first time two people have died trying to protect nature in Turkey. If we win, it will set a precedent that will help others in a similar position,” said one of those close to the campaign. “It would be a big step for Turkey. Ali and Aysin may be dead but they can still help the living.”
Ed Webb

The Tourism Crash | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...tunisias-tourism-crash

Tunisia politics transition economy tourism

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Sep 17 - Cached
  • the country’s tourism sector has slumped dramatically. Foreign travelers booked 29 million nights in Tunisian hotels in 2014, but a year later that figure had plummeted to 16 million. In a country where 11.5 percent of workers are employed in the tourism sector, and the livelihoods of many more are affected by its performance, the impact has been devastating.
  • pervasive cronyism, which allows well-connected insiders to seek rents in lucrative markets while using bureaucratic allies to prevent potential competitors from challenging them
  • A 2014 World Bank report found that the Tunisian tourism sector accounts for a whopping 25 percent of the country’s non-performing loans — which, as the authors noted, “mask the problems in the tourism sector and contribute to them by channeling credit to less productive entrepreneurs and by freezing liquidity that would otherwise have circulated.
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  • After the 2015 killings, the government once again bailed out floundering big hotel owners with money from the public budget by forgiving their debts, waiving their social security taxes, and covering their electricity bills. The justification many legislators gave at the time was that they needed to help hotel owners keep people employed at a time of crisis. Yet Karboul, the former tourism minister, says that the excuse doesn’t entirely wash. “A lot of people say it’s about jobs, but these bad hotels didn’t create jobs,” she says, noting that only a small fraction of the sector — some 20 percent — have the successful business model, high profits, and professional management needed to create value and jobs.
  • industry that continues to be dominated by large, well-connected, state-subsidized hotels and tour operators. And that, in turn, has tended to encourage an extremely narrow and fragile business model: mass package tourism. In some ways this was also a logical choice in light of the country’s chronically high unemployment and the workers’ relatively low levels of skills and education. But the reliance on quantity over quality brought problems of its own. Above all, as the political scientist Robert Poirier pointed out in a 1995 analysis of Tunisia’s tourism sector, it’s an approach that is sensitive to “political instability, both regional and Tunisia-specific.”
  • boutique hotels continued to thrive after the revolution, while hotel operators who relied on mass tourism began to have problems due to fears of political instability. “This shows that diversification of products can really help,”
  • Turkey has seen great success in recent years partly by capitalizing on unique, personalized tourism services available at all price ranges, including penny-pinching backpackers and students. Such flexibility could well pay off for Tunisia — especially at a time when competitors like Egypt are also hurting
  • structural challenges remain. One of the biggest, says Karboul, is access to credit, a problem that bedevils entrepreneurs in all sectors. That should serve as yet another reminder that the best way to revive the fortunes of Tunisia’s sagging tourism sector is by tackling the problems of the broader economy
Ed Webb

World Cup host Qatar used ex-CIA officer to spy on FIFA | AP News - 0 views

apnews.com/...4753c3f425650eedfef6c264bf669c

Qatar US USA CIA intelligence espionage surveillance migrants FIFA football soccer sports

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Nov 21 - Cached
  • a trend of former U.S. intelligence officers going to work for foreign governments with questionable human rights records
  • “Pickaxe,” which promised to capture “personal information and biometrics” of migrants working in Qatar. A project called “Falconeye” was described as a plan to use drones to provide surveillance of ports and borders operations, as well as “controlling migrant worker populations centers.”“By implementing background investigations and vetting program, Qatar will maintain dominance of migrant workers,” one GRA document said.
  • The private surveillance business has flourished in the last decade in the Persian Gulf as the region saw the rise of an information war using state-sponsored hacking operations that have coincided with the run-up to the World Cup.
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  • Chalker declined requests for an interview or to answer detailed questions about his work for the Qatari government. Chalker also claimed that some of the documents reviewed by the AP were forgeries.
  • The AP took several steps to verify the documents’ authenticity. That includes confirming details of various documents with different sources, including former Chalker associates and soccer officials; cross-checking contents of documents with contemporaneous news accounts and publicly available business records; and examining electronic documents’ metadata, or digital history, where available, to confirm who made the documents and when. Chalker did not provide to the AP any evidence to support his position that some of the documents in question had been forged.
Ed Webb

Ahead of COP27, Egypt is highly vulnerable to climate change - 0 views

qz.com/-for-climate-change-1849657612

Egypt water agriculture food land climate COP sustainability SDGs

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Adel Abdullah cultivates a subsistence living off of six acres of peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and pomegranates. He is one of millions of smallholder farmers working in the Delta. He walks barefoot in his farm as a show of reverence to the land. The soil is pale and thin, almost as sandy as the beach, and choked by mounting concentrations of salt, left behind by periodic coastal flooding and pushed into underground aquifers by the rising sea.“This is the first place to be affected by climate change,” Abdullah says. “The barriers help a bit with flooding, but the salty soil is still really killing us.”
  • he takes irrigation water from the nearby Kitchener Drain, one of the largest and most polluted canals in Egypt that aggregates wastewater from the farms, businesses, and households of an estimated 11 million people in the Delta. By the time water reaches Abdullah’s farm, it may have been reused half a dozen times since entering Egypt in the Nile, each time accumulating more salts and pollutants and losing beneficial nutrients.
  • Abdullah is forced to douse the farm in fertilizers, pesticides, and salt-suppressing chemicals, all of which further degrade the soil. Those inputs, on top of the rising costs of irrigation systems and machinery, eat up any potential income Abdullah might earn
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  • The Nile Delta—where agriculture employs one-fifth of the country’s workforce and is responsible for 12% of its GDP and much of its food supply—is being hammered by rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and a growing shortage of water.
  • rapid urbanization and population growth
  • Climate adaptation solutions that could keep environmental problems from turning existential—fixing the battered and wasteful irrigation network, expanding affordable access to improved seeds and climate-smart farming technologies, and more effective and equitable regulation of urban development on agricultural land—are being rolled out by the government and research groups, but often slower than the pace of climate impacts. That’s left Egypt’s economy and food security exposed to growing risk.
  • “We’re really squeezed and marginalized here, and the government isn’t helping,” said one farmer down the road from Abdullah, who requested anonymity to speak frankly (with tens of thousands of political prisoners, Egypt’s restrictions on free speech are also gaining prominence ahead of COP27).
  • his children see no future in agriculture
  • Around 1805, an Ottoman general named Muhammad Ali took control of the country, and founded the dynasty of kings that would rule—eventually under British colonial supervision—for 150 years. One of Ali’s most enduring marks on the country was the establishment of the first modern network of dams and irrigation canals in the Delta, which allowed tens of thousands of new acres to come under cultivation.
  • water and land played a crucial role in Nasser’s legacy. 12% of the country’s arable land was owned by the aristocracy; Nasser nationalized this land and distributed it to about 340,000 impoverished rural families. He also further extended Ali’s irrigation network and oversaw construction of the Aswan High Dam, which brought an end to the Nile’s ancient seasonal flooding and fixed the river in its present position, with just two remaining branches forking through the Delta.
  • Egypt’s population has since more than quadrupled, to 104 million. Yet the flow of the Nile, which supplies more than 95% of the country’s water, has remained more or less constant. In the 1990s water availability fell below the international “water poverty” benchmark of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year.
  • Egypt has managed that scarcity by meticulously recycling agricultural water and, in recent years, curtailing the production of water-intensive crops like cotton and rice and importing 40% of its wheat and other food staples.
  • The population is still growing quickly, and could reach 160 million by 2050. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam that is nearing completion upstream could cut the flow of Nile water into Egypt by a quarter during the as-yet-unknown number of years it will take to fill its reservoir. By 2100, climate change-related heat waves upstream could reduce the Nile’s flow by 75%, Abousabaa said.
  • current annual demand for water is about 35% higher than what the country receives from the Nile, groundwater, and a very small amount of rain—a deficit of about 20 billion cubic meters. To cover it, she said, Egypt will need to use every drop multiple times, aggressively minimize wastage, and boost the supply by investing $2.8 billion in dozens of new desalination plants with the aim to produce 5 billion cubic meters annually by 2050.
  • Egypt has made clear that COP27 will focus primarily on wringing climate finance out of the rich countries that are most responsible for climate change.
  • rising temperatures and falling rainfall mean crops—which consume 86% of Egypt’s water supply—will require more irrigation to survive.
  • The unpredictability makes it difficult to identify solutions, Salah says: “Climate change is like a big black box.”
  • “For the last two years, with heat wave after heat wave, we lost more than half the crop. It’s really sad.”
  • The farm relies on groundwater brought up from wells on the property, and Nasrallah says the suburbs are draining the aquifer. In the last four years he has had to dig an extra thirty meters to find water—and deeper wells mean higher electricity bills for pumping. Some wells have dried up altogether. Recently, government officials told him he had to stop watering the grass on a soccer field he built for his workers.
  • Urbanization is also spreading in the inner Delta, as many farmers decide that constructing housing is more profitable than growing crops. Since the 1970s, about 14% of the Delta’s arable land has been converted to urban development
  • Individual farms are also becoming smaller with each generation as, in keeping with longstanding Egyptian custom, land is divided among a father’s heirs (with sons traditionally taking a larger share than daughters). Urban development degrades the Delta’s soil and drives more farming into the desert, leaving the entire food system more vulnerable to climate impacts. Land fragmentation leads to the inefficient use of water and other resources and raises the costs of distribution for farmers.
  • in some cases, the government’s own plans are responsible, most recently in August when thousands of people living on a Nile island near Cairo that was primarily used for farming were evicted to make way for a state-sanctioned development project.
  • The network started by Muhammed Ali now includes about 33,000 miles of delivery and drainage canals across the country, enough to wrap around the globe, that range in size from small rivers to something a child could hop over. Delta residents say they used to bathe in these canals, drink from them, and raise fish in them. Now many of them, especially at the ends of the network, are polluted with farming chemicals and sewage, and choked with trash.
  • Between seepage, evaporation, and water wasted by farmers who flood their fields instead of using controlled irrigation hoses, nearly one-third of the country’s water is lost in the irrigation system between the Aswan High Dam and the sea
  • The soil is dark and appears rich, but is crusted with a visible layer of salt, a problem that affects up to 40% of Egypt’s arable soil.
  • Fixing the irrigation network is a priority for the government. Eman Sayed from the Irrigation Ministry said her agency has lined about 3,700 miles of canals with concrete in the last two years and is aiming to finish another 12,400 in the next few years. The ministry is also helping farmers cover the cost of installing drip irrigation systems, which researchers at AUC found can cut farmers’ water consumption 61% per year; today such systems cover only one-sixth of arable land in Egypt.
  • Authorities have also begun to restrict production of water-intensive crops like rice and bananas, although farmers say there is little enforcement of these rules, and both crops are still widely cultivated throughout the Delta.
  • On the western fringe of the Delta, farms and suburbs are gradually overtaking the desert as the central Delta grows more crowded. Here, water is even scarcer and the impacts of climate change are more pronounced. But in this and a few other desert areas around Egypt, the government is working to link more than 1.5 million acres to groundwater irrigation, and says it is about one-third of the way there. Land reclamation could take some pressure off the Delta, and sandy soils are well-suited for the production of citrus fruits that are one of Egypt’s most lucrative exports.
  • On the horizon, an offshore natural gas platform is visible. Egypt, which seized the disruption of Russian energy supplies to Europe because of the Ukraine war as an opening to boost its own exports of natural gas, is now contributing more to the problem than ever before; an independent review of its new climate strategy ranked it “highly insufficient” for averting disastrous levels of carbon emissions.
  • By 2100, Noureldeen says, sea level rise could inundate nearly 700 square miles of the coastal Delta and displace four million people.
Ed Webb

Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...l-id-women-breaking-hijab-laws

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shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jan 23 - Cached
  • After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.
  • Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”
  • Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.
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  • Decades ago, Iranian law required women to take off headscarves in line with modernization plans, with police sometimes forcing women to do so. But hijab wearing became compulsory in 1979 when the country became a theocracy.
  • Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.
  • Some face recognition in use in Iran today comes from Chinese camera and artificial intelligence company Tiandy. Its dealings in Iran were featured in a December 2021 report from IPVM, a company that tracks the surveillance and security industry.
  • US Department of Commerce placed sanctions on Tiandy, citing its role in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China and the provision of technology originating in the US to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The company previously used components from Intel, but the US chipmaker told NBC last month that it had ceased working with the Chinese company.
  • When Steven Feldstein, a former US State Department surveillance expert, surveyed 179 countries between 2012 and 2020, he found that 77 now use some form of AI-driven surveillance. Face recognition is used in 61 countries, more than any other form of digital surveillance technology, he says.
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Egypt Sisi military politics parliament propaganda censorship parties

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Jan 24 - Cached
  • MAM was a concrete effort to prepare and groom regime-sponsored municipal election candidates. Mandhour and other MAM leaders did not hide it and were openly proclaiming the mission of building a “politically aware” and “responsible” community of young leaders qualified to serve on municipal councils.
  • the regime padded MAM with the special recipe MWP lacked: the experience and political networks of the former NDP. In other words, for the first time in his reign, Sisi was seriously reckoning with the traditional political classes he once dismissed. The president realized that for the NYP to survive outside of its traditional domains of scripted conventions and invitation-only conferences and to assert influence in formal political life, it would need to work and compromise with the very political notables and insiders he had long shunned
  • The slogan, Min Agl Masr, riffed off the phrase “‘ashan Masr,”عشان مصر colloquial for MAM, which Sisi frequently invoked whenever pleading with the public to show sacrifice or patience (or both) for the country’s greater good. It was catchy and it caught on until it became the regime’s de facto brand. And as the election season neared, MAM launched a campaign in support of Sisi’s presidential bid under the banner “Kolena Ma‘ak Min Agl Masr” كلنا معاك من اجل مصر (“We Are All with You for the Sake of Egypt) or All-MAM for short. Two years later, as it prepared for parliamentary elections, the regime ended up naming its own sponsored list “The National List-MAM.” The slogan was everywhere, so much so that it even became the title of multiple songs, including ones by Shaaban Abdel Rahim, Mohamed ‘Adawiyya, and Mohamed Fouad.
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  • MAM’s deference to expertise and social capital was also evident in its reliance on individuals with prior NDP credentials; that is, people who had the knowledge and connections to run a political machine. While some of the cofounders of MAM fit that bill, All-MAM was in some ways an NDP reunion.
  • Nothing symbolized Sisi’s embrace of Mubarak’s political machine more than All-MAM’s pick for secretary general, Mohamed Heiba, the former NDP Secretary of Youth. Under the leadership of Gamal Mubarak, Heiba was once at the forefront of the NDP’s youth mobilization efforts
  • Besides leaning on the seasoned political organizers of the NDP, All-MAM was also relying on the former ruling party’s big business politicians who brought to the table not only experience, but also money. The most emblematic example was mogul and former NDP lawmaker Mohamed Aboul Enein, an icon of the business clique that dominated politics during Mubarak’s final decade. Up until that point, the Sisi regime kept a largely cordial orientation toward the likes of Aboul Enein. Certainly, Sisi may have worked to politically disempower such oligarchs, but he steered clear of expropriating their assets, as Amr Adly notes. Thus, high-profile business NDPers such as Aboul Enein survived, and may have even thrived to some degree, but they were not encouraged to play politics.[4] For Aboul Enein specifically, the tide began to turn in 2018 in the lead-up to the presidential election, as he became a visible figure in the marketing of the Sisi campaign. The regime was not simply tolerating the former NDPer, as was previously the case. It was awarding him a political role, while proudly showcasing his support for the president. On a deeper level, Sisi was essentially indulging the NDP’s deep pockets, hoping they could bankroll the big campaigns the regime was about to embark upon. Sisi may hold a grudge or two against the Mubarakists, but he will always hold a place for those who pay.
  • the regime’s aggression had surpassed those rejecting the post-2013 political order and that the security apparatus was just as predatory in targeting opposition actors who have accepted the political system and agreed to work from within it
  • by early 2021, MWP looked much less like the youth-led party of 2014 and much more like MAM, with many of the association’s founders, including Mandhour, holding senior posts inside the party. Likewise, the NDPers made themselves quite comfortable inside MWP, as exemplified by Mohamed Aboul Enein, who became vice president of the party, not to mention deputy speaker of the House of Representatives following his return to parliament after the 2020 election.
  • their entry into MWP captures Sisi’s post-2018 rapprochement with the interests and clientelistic networks that once occupied the Mubarak regime, as distinct from the cadre of younger politicians Sisi had been trying to cultivate through the NYP
  • the NYP (or, at least, the “wisdom” behind it) was essential in facilitating Sisi’s accommodation with NDP-tied families. Many such families capitalized on the president’s NYP discourse, prodding their own younger members to enter the political stage under the guise of youth empowerment. It may be hard to believe, but longtime political families managed to gaslight Sisi right back: “You want youth? We’ll give you youth.” This strategy was evident in MWP to the extent that it featured young affiliates of NDP families. But it was more than just MWP. By the time the 2020 elections were over, the phenomenon of relatives of former lawmakers entering parliament became more visible across parties and regions, as Amr Hashem Rabee noted. Outside legislative chambers and Mustaqbal Watan, other parties jumped on the same bandwagon, recruiting and showing off young figures from politically prominent families. In other words, every establishment party is now cutting two carrots with one knife: get on Sisi’s good graces by checking off the youth empowerment box, and, at the same time, solidify alliances with politically distinguished families
  • Whereas between 2014 and 2018, the regime’s principal aim was keeping civilian politics weak, fragmented, and inconducive to collective action, its approach became more interventionist beginning 2018. This is because the president now had a clearer vision for political outcomes he needed to generate, majorities he wanted to manufacture, and allies he needed to coopt and reward.
  • MAM proved to be a useful instrument for coopting NDPers and deploying their resources and expertise on behalf of Sisi. Also, it kept these Mubarakists loyal to the president and away from the likes of Shafik and other presidential hopefuls eyeing the Mubarakist networks.
  • as Sisi began reorganizing his own political apparatus and putting his own ducks in a row, he embarked on an effort to sabotage his competitors and wreak havoc on their organizations and networks at an unusually broad scale
  • In contrast to 2015 when it sought to engineer a fragmented parliament, this time around, the regime wanted a majority for its own political arm and was adamant to stack the cards in favor of that outcome. Not only that, but the regime was also keen on dictating the candidate rosters of other independent parties participating on its own list, “The National List for the Sake of Egypt.” Indeed, Sisi was that determined not to leave anything to chance.
  • the 2020 election marked the reintroduction of parliament’s upper chamber. As a body devoid of any meaningful legislative powers, the Senate provided Sisi with a low-cost method of rewarding political allies with “certificates of prestige.” Certainly, this was not unique to Sisi’s reign. This same tradition was prevalent under previous rulers. But that Sisi is now conforming to this same template shows that he has finally succumbed into resurrecting his predecessors’ cooptation and clientelistic practices after years of eschewing them in his dealing with civilian politics. The details might differ, but the overall story is a familiar one: the initially timid officers instinctively avoid getting their hands dirty by civilian politics, until the imperative for survival draws them into the same “swamp” they once swore to drain
  • Today, MWP controls parliament and serves as a vehicle for advancing Sisi’s political agenda. Yet, the president holds no affiliation with it and neither do most senior members of the government and the state apparatus. There has been no clear effort to encourage officials to affiliate with the party either. In other words, the president has kept MWP in this ambiguous space akin to a political “friendzone.”
  • Sisi’s refusal to grant MWP (or any party for that matter) the status (and privileges) of a ruling party arguably speaks to the persistence of his populist instincts and his own belief that he is in fact capable of ruling without the mediation of any political class.
  • for Sisi, turning MWP into an actual ruling party would be ceding power and access to the very political forces he has been trying to contain. If the NDP (along with all its missteps) was the reason for Mubarak’s demise, why give its descendants the chance to grow and gain more influence through MWP? Therein lies the source of the paradox: Sisi needs the NDPers’ expertise and resources, but he is aware their support cannot take for granted. Thus, despite Sisi’s accommodation with the Mubarak regime’s networks and their presence in MWP, the president’s propaganda machine remains discursively hostile to NDP remnants, especially more recently with growing chatter about a Gamal Mubarak presidential bid.
  • The president may believe that his investment in this project will someday bear fruit, contributing to a new reality actualizing his vision for the ideal civilian politician—that is, the politician who will blindly defer to the men in the uniform, accept their supremacy, and respect their economic privileges (with all the corrupt practices they entail).
  • The regime’s continued inability to assert its hegemony over the formal political sphere, its dependency on political intermediaries it does not trust, and the shutting out of credible competitors from politics, have all limited Sisi’s political options for managing the ongoing economic crisis
  • the realm of formal politics has become so discredited that the regime itself is aware that it will not provide its international audiences a sufficiently persuasive façade of democratic politics
  • Sisi’s long struggle to invent the politics he dreams of through his political grooming projects, while evading the politics he actually faces by gaslighting his allies and critics, alike
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